Our coverage of Denver's Mile High Music Festival

Posted on 20 August 2010 | 11:39 am

Beautiful Denver, Colorado was the site for last weekend's Mile High Music Festival, a two-day extravaganza of live music and veggie burritos. We got to spend time with several musicians at the fest:

Boombox
Danielle Ate The Sandwich
Drive-by Truckers (Patterson Hood)
Mayer Hawthorne & the County
The Motet (Dave Watts)
John Oates (of Hall & Oates)
One eskimO
Phoenix
Joe Purdy
Railroad Earth
Tim Reynolds (of TR3 & Dave Matthews Band)
Slightly Stoopid (Miles Doughty)
Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi
Weezer
Z-Trip

To access all of our artist interviews at festivals and live shows, follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Next up? Austin City Limits in October.

Be part of a Pandora video!

Posted on 13 August 2010 | 4:23 pm

CLARIFICATION ON HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR VIDEO AT BOTTOM:

Dear Listeners -

We'd like to hear - and see! - what you think and have to say about Pandora. We're putting together a fun video piece of user-submitted videos about your experiences with Pandora: what it does for you during your day, a special moment, what it means to you, your friends, your family - anything fun or funny or special about Pandora that you'd like to tape and share and send in, please do! This can be just you, a group of friends, a class, team, office, troupe - any combination you can think of. We'll turn them into a thoughtful, tasteful, and joyful montage of our listeners.

Of course, this great idea has a limited time frame - we need all videos in by WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 18TH NOON PACIFIC TIME - short time frame, we know, but we think you're up for the challenge! Our only requirement is that you keep it clean and under thirty seconds.

As an extra thanks, we'll be sending t-shirts to the creators of the first 50 submissions (be sure to give us your mailing address and shirt size(s)). We ask that you read and complete the legal form that lets us use your video, and send the completed form in with your video - without that form, we can't use your video.

Thanks and looking forward to hearing and seeing your creations!

-Tim (Founder)

Update on how to submit:
The only way to submit your video is to click on the yellow "ACCEPT" at the bottom of the submission/legal form. When you click the "ACCEPT" button, an email opens to which you can attach your video and send to us.

Profiles

Posted on 3 August 2010 | 6:45 pm

Dear Listeners,

We've just updated our site to make it easier for you to find and adjust your privacy settings. We thought it was important to make this adjustment to better reflect the realities of the internet today. If you're a returning listener you've probably already seen a reminder about your Pandora profile page, something we've offered since we launched.

This reminder provides you with the immediate opportunity to see your profile, make it public, private, or learn more. If you click on 'Learn More,' you'll be taken to some FAQs.

New listeners will see a similar message when they register and we're in the process of sending emails to the folks who listen to Pandora exclusively on mobile devices, encouraging them to access their Pandora account on a computer to check out our new privacy features.

All profile pages on Pandora now have a prominent 'Privacy Settings' link on the upper right. These settings let you specify how public you want your profile to be and, if you're a Facebook user - whether or not you'd like to import your information from Facebook to Pandora.

We're big believers in the social aspect of music discovery and sharing and want to make it as easy as possible, but we also want to make sure we respect each listeners' personal comfort when it comes to this. It is our sincere hope that this new format does just that!

As always - we welcome your feedback about this. It's a very important issue to us and we want to get it right.

Thanks for taking the time to read this through - and keep on listening!

- Tim (Founder)

Artist interviews - the Avett Brothers, Colbie Caillat and more

Posted on 25 July 2010 | 10:46 pm

Louisville, Kentucky was home to the HullabaLOU festival this weekend, and it was a corker - a fandango, a high-class hoedown. Churchill Downs played host, as they do for the Kentucky Derby every year. Some of the artists who sat down with us:

The Avett Brothers
Sam Bush
Dierks Bentley
Colbie Caillat
Andrea Davidson
Ben Folds
Gloriana
Gov't Mule
Brigid Kaelin
Michael Johnathon
Michael McDonald
Taddy Porter
Terry Adams Rock & Roll Quartet
.38 Special
Tonic
The Villebillies
Rhonda Vincent

Pandora's Bonnaroo coverage

Posted on 21 June 2010 | 12:54 pm

Last weekend, our festival coverage feed included interviews with many of the artists performing at the Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tennessee. Lots of mud, lots of sunscreen, and several truckloads of great musicians. Here are some of the highlights from those interviews:

Jill Andrews	The Entrance Band	Ozomatli
Aterciopelados	Everest	The Postelles
Baroness	Michael Franti & Spearhead	The RBC
Bassnectar	Frontier Ruckus	Red Cortez
Big Sam's Funky Nation	Joshua James	Joe Robinson
Blues Traveler	Sarah Jarosz	Martin Sexton
The Bridge	Lissie	Harper Simon
Elizabeth Cook	Local Natives	Angus & Julia Stone
Samantha Crain	Lotus	Temper Trap
The Crystal Method	Imelda May	Tiny Animals
The Devil Makes Three	The Melvins	Tokyo Police Club
Kevin Devine	The Moondoggies	Truth & Salvage Co.
Disco Biscuits	Morning Teleportation	Frank Turner
The Dodos	Julia Nunes	Jonathan Tyler & the Northern Lights
Elmwood	OK Go	(a little bonus)

Next up in late July is HullabaLOU in Louisville, Kentucky; here's a handy HullabaLOU guide to help you figure out which acts you might like. Stay tuned on Twitter for more coverage, and let us know any questions you have for these musicians -- we'll do our best to include listener questions.

Upcoming Town Halls in Denver and Atlanta

Posted on 18 June 2010 | 11:52 am

Hey all -

We're having Pandora town-halls in Denver and Atlanta next week. If you're in one of those cities and haven't gotten your email invite, send a note to 'tour@pandora.com' and we'll put you on the list.

Town halls are a big part of what Pandora is about. They continue to be wonderful opportunities for us meet and communicate directly with listeners.

We love feedback and people at Pandora events often weigh in on how Pandora should look in the future. In addition, I talk a bit about some company history, as well as a look under the hood of the music genome, and our latest thinking about the future. The questions and discussions always cover a wide range of topics - from how the music genome project works, to licensing, to the latest device updates. Everything is fair game!

So if you're in Denver or Atlanta next week I hope you'll come and hang and chat for an hour and a bit, that's usually how long the town halls last. And if you're in another city and think it is time we had a town hall there, let us know by emailing 'tour@pandora.com,' and we'll add it to the list!

Details below about Denver and Atlanta. See you soon!

-Tim (Founder)

Denver
When: Monday, June 21st, 6:30 p.m. (Note: the Denver Art Museum is closed for general admission on Mondays but the Sharp Auditorium will be open for this event.)
Where: Denver Art Museum's Fredric C. Hamilton Building at 100 West 13th Avenue. The event will be held in the Lewis I. Sharp Auditorium.
RSVP: Send email to tour@pandora.com with number of guests
Directions: http://www.denverartmuseum.org/visit_us/plan_your_visit/location_and_hours

Atlanta
When: Tuesday, June 22nd, 6 p.m.
Where: Tabernacle @ 152 Luckie Street NW (1 block from Centennial Olympic Park, Philips Arena, The Georgia World Congress Center and The Georgia Dome)
RSVP: Send email to tour@pandora.com with number of guests
Directions: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=152+luckie+st,+30303&ie=UTF8&om=1&hq=&hnear=152+Luckie+St+NW,+Atlanta,+Fulton,+Georgia+30303&ll=33.758527,-84.390965&spn=0.012916,0.015278&z=16
*The venue is surrounded by paid parking lots; the MARTA stop is Dome/GWCC/Philips/CNN.

A More Social Pandora

Posted on 21 April 2010 | 2:14 pm

Dear listeners -

After months of furious development, this morning we're launching a major new initiative on Pandora.

As you may know, we've tried for a while now to figure out how to incorporate the more social aspects of music into our service. Sharing music is, after all, one of life's great pleasures.

The idea behind today's update is to make it really easy to share your Pandora stations and music discoveries with your friends - and vice versa. Now your friends can be a daily source of inspiration for new stations and music discovery. I've been testing out the service while we were developing it and I have to say it really brings a wonderful new human dimension to the listening experience.

To make this truly easy for you, we've partnered with the experts at Facebook. Starting today, you can easily link your experience on Pandora with your friends on Facebook. This quickly brings your Facebook friend list into Pandora along with your Facebook profile picture. It quite literally puts a whole new face on Pandora.

Know that this is entirely optional. Even though we're excited about the new dimension this adds to Pandora, we want to be very respectful of your privacy. If you don't want to bring your Facebook world into Pandora, just opt out. It will disappear forever. Period.

As always, and maybe on this one more than ever, we're eager to hear what you think.

Enjoy!

Tim (Founder)

P.S. For more detail, feel free to check out: blog.pandora.com/faq/contents/10010.html

Pandora Background Listening for iPhone OS 4

Posted on 12 April 2010 | 8:23 pm

Back in the summer of 2008, Pandora had over 10 million listeners on the web and we were growing at a pretty good clip. Then in July we released Pandora for iPhone and everything changed. Suddenly, people could take Pandora with them: into the gym, the car, the living room, the kitchen, outside while jogging... the list goes on. Pandora truly became an anytime, anywhere phenomenon and as a result the use of Pandora accelerated dramatically. Less than two years later, we have over 50 million listeners and mobile listening accounts for more than 40% of the hours we stream.

In the years that followed, we brought Pandora to more and more environments with the goal of being everywhere our listeners wanted us to be: on Blackberries and Androids, Blu-Rays and TVs.

However, there was still one thing missing for our iPhone users: background listening. That's all about to change.

Some weeks ago Apple invited us to a secret meeting where they revealed that background applications were coming to the iPhone OS 4 and that they'd like to use Pandora to show off these new capabilities at their big iPhone OS 4 product unveiling. Under the new operating system, Pandora will stream in the background while you use your iPhone to browse the web, read an e-book or play a game.

Participating in Apple's launch event meant sending an engineer to Apple to update our software for OS 4 (this took about a day) and many, many, many (many) hours of presentation preparation so that we'd be ready to share the stage with Steve Jobs. This of course was all done with the utmost secrecy. Just a tiny handful of people even inside Pandora knew what we were doing.

Getting to participate in one of these Apple events has been a kind of lifelong dream for me. The Apple folks are masters of these types of presentations and it was an incredible experience to get to experience it from the inside. As our Founder Tim and I stood on stage presenting, there was a moment about halfway through where my nerves calmed enough (The software was going to work! It was going to be ok!) that I could just enjoy the moment and just take it all in. I don't think I'll ever forget it.

Apple released the iPhone OS 4 Developer Preview this week so that engineers can start updating their applications in anticipation of the launch of the new OS sometime this summer. We're incredibly excited to enable background listening on the iPhone (and ultimately on the iPad too) -- we'll be ready just as soon as Apple ships the new OS.

-Tom

Pandora on iPad

Posted on 2 April 2010 | 9:10 am

Tomorrow morning as the first iPads are delivered, we'll be launching an entirely new Pandora application built from the ground up for the iPad.

Pandora on iPad has been completely re-imagined for the iPad's big touch interface. I think of it as the ultimate lean-in Pandora experience. Just tap the Pandora icon and let the music play while you read about the bands and music you discover. Pass it back and forth with a friend and share your discoveries. My hope is that it can play the same role that the album cover did when I was a kid -- something concrete to enjoy and share as the music plays. There's something magical about that, and this really is a magical device.

For me, this is the culmination of an almost 20 year wait. Some kids go to college so they can become a doctor. Some go with the dream of success in business. Some go in pursuit of knowledge. Some go just to have a good time.

I went so I could work at Apple.

That's not a joke, or an exaggeration. I literally went with that singular goal and by some stroke of incredible luck, I managed to land a job there upon my graduation 18 years ago. Working at Apple was an amazing experience; the company is full of incredible people driven by a desire to change the world. During my four years there I saw all sorts of incredible products: some commonplace (the PowerBook), some infamous (the Newton) and some that never saw the light of day. Chief among those that were never released were all manner of "tablet" Macintoshes. Powered by pens and touch, these fabled devices where designed to set the Mac free from the confines of the keyboard. In the end though, it wasn't meant to be. We could never settle on the right combination of hardware, software, and economics that would make the machines practical and popular.

None the less, there was something incredible about even those early experiments, and I've waited almost 20 years for some variety of tablet from Apple that would finally resolve all the issues and get the formula right. So it's with great anticipation that I look forward to the launch of the iPad tomorrow.

I'll be in line at an Apple Store with everyone else to pick mine up. If you decide to do the same, I hope you'll give Pandora on iPad a listen and let us know what you think. We'd love the feedback.

50,000,000!

Posted on 1 April 2010 | 6:00 pm

We celebrated a big milestone for the company last week. Sometime late Thursday evening our 50 millionth listener registered for Pandora!

Amazing to us how this has all happened by word of mouth.

The growth of mobile has clearly helped a ton. An ever-increasing number of folks are coming to Pandora for the first time on a smartphone or a blue-ray player, or a connected home audio device. Lots more evening and weekend usage. The vision for Pandora anytime, anywhere is really starting to take shape...

Thanks again for listening, and for spreading the word! Next stop 100,000,000!

Tim (Founder)