What is the music genome project and how did this lead to the launch of Pandora?
I started the music genome project about nine and a half years ago trying to build a really smart recommendation and discovery tool. The idea itself grew out of my own experiences as a musician. I spent my twenties trying to make my living as a musician, both as a performer, in rock bands and also as a film composer. I began in 1999 and we hired this team of ultimately about 60 musicians to start building this enormous database. We were collecting the musical equivalent of DNA and we spent about five years building that. We tried out a whole bunch of different business models none of which really worked but just kept building that database and eventually figured out that, radio is a perfect use for this thing. When did you decide to create a radio site? We launched the radio site itself in November 2005. We just realized it was the perfect use of this database, which was a song-based system for a way to connect music. It just fit like a glove as soon as we started building it. And what
