Youth Radio - Topic: Tim Westergren

Why Pandora Won't Rewind

cfoster — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:00:44 -0500

Why can't you rewind or replay a song on Pandora.com? And when you type in the name of a song you want to hear, why will a different (but, yes, similar) song start to play instead? Argh, it's so annoying! But, it turns out, it's also the reason why the Web site can play those songs for free as a Webcaster. In the final installment of our latest Brains and Beakers series, Pandora's Tim Westergren devles into some of the nitty gritty of Web radio, a technology that, in his words, "just blew up."

Previously:

About Brains & Beakers

With support from the National Science Foundation, Youth Radio wants to change the way young people think about science--and scientists. What better way to do that than to make science a media event? Youth Radio joined forces with David Pescovitz from the website Boing Boing and the Institute for the Future to invite a stellar line-up of inventors, engineers, and investigators to our studios in Oakland, Calif. For each segment in the series, our guests provide interactive hands-on demos and then take questions from Youth Radio interviewers.

The Business of Webcasting

cfoster — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:34:39 -0500

There are many steps (and sometimes many years) before a good business idea becomes a good business. For the Web radio site Pandora.com, those steps included raising over $1 million from investors and spending five years building the Music Genome Project before it was ready to launch. In the fourth video of our latest Brains and Beakers series, founder Tim Westergren tells us how he made the move from musician to entrepreneur and how he maxed out his personal credit cards in the process.

Previously:

About Brains & Beakers

Web Radio on the Go

cfoster — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:02:52 -0500

Sure, Web radio sounds great when you're sitting in front of your computer, plugged in to the Internet. But what do you listen to on your commute to school or during your daily jog? Pandora's Tim Westergren says the increased popularity of mobile devices, like smart phones, has in turn boosted Web radio's reach. Watch the latest video in our Brains & Beakers series below.

Previously:

About Brains & Beakers

Pandora and the Rise of Webcasting

cfoster — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:45:15 -0500

In the second video from his Web radio workshop, Pandora founder Tim Westergren talks about how his Web site builds its song playlists and how webcasting is becoming more popular than broadcasting.

About Brains & Beakers

Your Favorite Music's DNA

cfoster — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:05:41 -0500

For our latest Brains and Beakers workshop, Youth Radio hosted Tim Westergren, founder of the online radio service Pandora.com. Tim studied recording technology at Stanford and has worked in the music industry for 20 years as a composer, musician and record producer. In 1999, during the height of the dot-com boom, he noticed that people were listening to more and more music online and wondered if there was a way to create a personalized web radio station that plays only songs that matched an individual listener’s tastes.

To do that, he launched the Music Genome Project – a collection of songs that have been analyzed one by one according to 400 musical attributes, like rhythm, harmony, and instrumentation. Their musical DNA, in other words. When you type a song you like into Pandora, the Web site plays songs with similar DNA. Call it compiling sonic taxonomy, sequencing musical phylogenetics… or just playing one hit after another.

In the first of five videos, Tim talks about how Pandora’s in-house musicians break down every song on the Web site into its musical characteristics. “Any piece of music, whatever the rhythm is, we can understand it through some combination of these attributes,” he says.

About Brains & Beakers