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Pandora continues to grow with 250 million registered users

There are one billion FM radios in the US and 160 million smartphones and 160 million PCs, so it’s still a subset of the FM marketplace.

Pittman doesn’t believe streaming hours will overtake traditional radio in his lifetime.

In March, Pandora hired local sales staff in St. Louis as part of its strategy to court local advertisers, and it’s had success out of the gate landing customers. Don Brown Chevrolet, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis University and Panera Bread Co. are just a few of the advertisers that have booked ads on Pandora so far this year.

It’s spent the past two years expanding its sales staff nationwide.

Its regional sales staff of 60 employees nationwide is growing, and Pandora plans on ultimately having an office in each of the top 50 radio markets.

Accommodated as we are to mass media, we must work to imagine the impact of commercial radio broadcasting in its early years. From the late 1800s, new electronic devices had been expanding the realm of shared human experience — people conversed on telephones, sent news through telegrams, played records on phonographs, and enjoyed films in local theaters. But until the radio, nothing offered such widely shared simultaneous mass experience. By turning on your radio set, you could listen to a jazz band, baseball game, religious service, even a president’s speech, live, along with millions of fellow listeners.

Pandora (which is also the name of the company) grew out of the Music Genome Project, which company founder Tim Westergren began six years ago.

He became fascinated with the way directors described the music they were looking for, which led to his wondering what made people enjoy certain types of music. He asked himself, "If people haven't found any music that they love since college, and artists are struggling to find an audience, is there a role for technology to help bridge the gap?"

Westergren started the Genome Project from the idea of creating a platform for connecting people with music that they'll love based on music they already enjoy. The project uses experts called "music analysts" to deconstruct music into its fundamental parts and capture the results into a database. Pandora has 40 professional musicians who come to the office every day and listen to one song at a time, analyzing each in anywhere from 200 to 400 dimensions. (The dimensions are somewhat different for each genre of music.)

It’s clear that radio is evolving – and this evolution is being propelled by consumers and technology

Key to Pandora’s success, is that we offer listeners an interactive and social experience that is incredibly personal, and artists a channel to be discovered by a new legion of fans

Pandora has no concept of genre, user connections or ratings. It doesn't care what other people who like Gomez also like. When you create a radio station on Pandora, it uses a pretty radical approach to delivering your personalized selections: Having analyzed the musical structures present in the songs you like, it plays other songs that possess similar musical traits

Pandora relies on a Music Genome that consists of 400 musical attributes covering the qualities of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition and lyrics. It's a project that began in January 2000 and took 30 experts in music theory five years to complete. The Genome is based on an intricate analysis by actual humans (about 20 to 30 minutes per four-minute song) of the music of 10,000 artists from the past 100 years. The analysis of new music continues every day since Pandora's online launch in August 2005. As of May 2006, the Genome's music library contains 400,000 analyzed songs from 20,000 contemporary artists. You won't find Latin or classical yet: Pandora is in the process of developing a specialized Latin music Genome and is still deep in thought about how to approach the world of classical composition.

Beginning in February, large nonhuman subjects have received weekly injections of cancer cells into their livers, creating a consistent model in a "controlled environment." This month, the subjects will undergo MRIs to determine whether they now have liver cancer. If affirmative, the Kanzius noninvasive radio-wave cancer treatment will be administered, allowing data to be collected and analyzed. The success of these tests is mandatory to move forward in approaching the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and ultimately advancing to human trials.

Both have established impressive track records leading Pandora’s strong team of technologists.

“I’m excited to promote two top technology leaders to these important positions.

Mr. Conrad has led Pandora’s engineering and product organization from the product’s inception and has guided the team as they delivered increasingly sophisticated playlist techniques, mobile, consumer electronics and in-car listening technology, as well as sophisticated advertising solutions

Pandora’s 48 million users tune in an average 11.6 hours a month. That could increase as Pandora strikes deals with the makers of cars, televisions and stereos

At the end of 2009, Pandora reported its first profitable quarter and $50 million in annual revenue — mostly from ads and the rest from subscriptions and payments from iTunes and Amazon.com when people buy music.

Its library now has 700,000 songs, each categorized by an employee based on 400 musical attributes, like whether the voice is breathy, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, or gravelly like Tom Waits.