Pandora Media is one of the most innovative music companies on earth. All apologies to Apple and the ubiquitous iPod and iTunes, but it is Pandora’s Internet radio platform that has spurred one of the first real transformations in how people discover new music since, well, radio itself. The company’s Music Genome Project carefully analyzes songs by the hundreds of thousands to understand the essential qualities that make people like them, then uses this knowledge to personally recommend new bands and songs to its listeners. To get started, all you do is type in the name of a song or band you like, and the website helps explain why it thinks you like it, and then begins looking for other music in a similar vein that you will love. Voila — you have a radio station just for you. For example, a recent entry informed me that I had been a recommended a song because of “mellow rock instrumentation” and a “twelve-eight time signature,” among other factors. Pandora is your musical taste, quantified.

All that, and it runs pretty seamlessly on the iPhone. It’s the future of music on Apple’s platforms, too.

But for an organization premised on the idea of replacing the emotional and implicit factors of musical taste with a reliable algorithm for discovering new tunes you’ll love, Pandora is surprisingly dedicated to connecting with and understanding the lives of its two most critical stakeholders: music fans and musicians. Pandora Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Tim Westergren was a touring, work-a-day keyboard player in a variety of rock bands prior to creating the Music Genome Project. Because he had seen how the vast majority of rock musicians live — gig-to-gig, no label support, no security, no marketing — Westergren wanted to create a way to use the Internet to dramatically increase exposure for less-known artists. He had walked in their shoes, so he knew what he would have wanted to help promote his own music, and he worked with two partners to make such a music recommendation engine possible. 

But he didn’t stop there. Beginning in 2006, he started organizing “meet-ups” across the country where Pandora listeners could meet with him and share a little of themselves. He now spends about 100 days per year on the road, just meeting with local touring musicians and with music lovers around the country. It’s what he does to maintain a connection to the people who have fueled the growth of his ad-supported business (which now boasts well over 23 million users). 

We had the chance to talk with Tim on the phone in-between his busy meet-up schedule last week. And he told us about the big and little benefits he gets from empathy, from ideas for new product features to the gut-level intuition to stay on the right track in the face of competing ideas.

Q: So how did the Pandora meet-ups get started, and what was the rationale?
A: I originally intended just to travel around the country looking for music. I didn’t plan to do these meet-ups, I was just going to drive across the country and stop in all places big and small to get close to the local working musician scenes all over the country. Someone in  the office said, “Why not have a meet-up whenever you’re in a new town? You could post it to a blog!”

Now, I didn’t know what a meet-up or a blog was at the time, but I did that and I just began holding, in conjunction with visiting the musicians, these very informal get-togethers. They started off very small; the first one had six or seven people at it. I had no idea what to expect, and for the first few I just sat at a table at a cafe and waited to see if anyone would show up. The first few conversations were really fun and interesting. The people were very enthusiastic and very pleased to talk directly to someone from the company, so we kept doing it, and over time it grew and grew. The last one we did in New York had 3,000 RSVPs. That said, we never let them exceed a few hundred people; they’re still relatively small events.

The purpose of the meet-ups has not really changed. The two things I think are most valuable from our standpoint are, first, the cementing of relationships with our most strong supporters, the people who are really evangelizing Pandora, and having a chance to meet them personally. And then getting this constant flow of direct feedback is the other valuable thing — I can now pretty much speak for the listener in a meeting at Pandora. From a listener standpoint, it’s a really fun opportunity to talk directly to the founder of the company. I’m going to do meet-ups until I fall from exhaustion.

Q: That’s really interesting, because Pandora is built on trying to quantify something that’s pretty intangible. Why, then, do you devote so much of your personal time to connecting with music fans? 
A: I think that you get a subjective level of nuance in conversation, both with individuals and as a group, where when you ask, ‘What do you all think about this feature?” and you hear the groan of the audience, [you know you need to fix them]. It’s a very effective way of learning how people listen to things.

Q: Can you point to specific features or product changes that came directly from interactions with the public?
A: Yeah, a lot of them. Truth be told,  it’s really a good number. A pretty significant piece of our priorities list comes from feedback from listeners. One of the very first features we built after launch was the ability to undo their thumb feedbacks (Editors note: Pandora listeners shape their Internet radio stations by giving a “Thumbs Up!” or “Thumbs Down!” rating to songs the service suggests for them). We got very strong feedback from folks who said, “I spent two hours refining my playlist, but I made one mistake and now it’s all ruined (playing unwanted songs)!” We heard this very loud chorus of people, so we changed it within a couple months after we’d launched.

Q: What’s the biggest surprise you’ve discovered in the course of your travels and connections with music fans out in the world?
A: The level of passion that people have. It kind of is and isn’t surprising to me. The meet-ups can get really intense. Music is a very personal, powerful thing for people. They often come to these meet-ups with a very strong emotional state already, because Pandora has helped them rediscover that love (of music). And sometimes they’ve come just to say thank you. And it’s really emotional.

Someone said to me that (the meet-ups) have a confessional tone to them, which is an interesting away to put it. Pandora, in a way, talks to people about their personal musical love, so it gives you permission to be somewhat intimate, and people are very, very personal about this stuff.

Q: Do you mean that Pandora’s servers might be the only things that know this person secretly loves a band that the rest of their friends hate?
A: That’s just a little piece of it. Music, certainly as you’re growing up, is a strong piece of your identity. As you get into your twenties and you’re working and so on, its role in your life diminishes. So, it’s very enriching for people, and powerful, to get that connection back. And I think that is fundamentally what drives their emotion.

Q: Was helping people reclaim the emotional side of music part of the original intent of Pandora?
A: I don’t know if I would define it as getting to this personal emotional world of people, but I certainly was driven by a willingness to get them to discover new music. I was passionate about helping working musicians to find the audience they deserved.

Q: There’s another side of this story that I’ve heard about, which is that to maintain the connection to the musicians you help promote, you actually hire a lot of musicians to work at Pandora.
A: Yeah, the foundation of Pandora is this thing called the Music Genome Project, which is an enormous musical taxonomy. The thing about it is, it’s all hand-built. We have a team of about 35 working musicians, and they listen to songs all day and analyze what’s going on with them. For 9 years now, that’s become a pretty substantial number of artists.

Q: How many songs have been classified now?
A: A little over 600,000.

Q: In Wired to Care, one of the topics we spend a long time on is the idea of widespread empathy. It’s one thing to have a leader like you who has a tight connection to a particular group of folks and has an intuition for them as a result; it’s another to empower everyone in an organization to share that intuition. What do you do at Pandora to help everyone you’ve hired since starting the Genome Project with Will Glaser and Jon Kraft nine years ago to see what you saw when you decided to get this project off the ground?
A: Well, I think that happens in lots of little ways. We do have a thing called Pandora University that every new employee goes through when they’re hired, to teach them about who we are, what we want to be, our mission, and our values and so on. Our attitude toward musicians looms large in that — respecting artists and respecting music. It’s a very strong message we give people from the very beginning.

But people get lots of orientation-speak when they join any company. I think what happens over time, our employees begin to see us as a company that reflects a respect for musicians, how we interact with musicians and listeners, and the choices we make wind up being pretty unambiguous in terms of our own culture. I think that’s what percolates. But it starts at the top, for sure.

Q: What would be your advice to any leader interested in creating the same kind of connection that you have at Pandora? How should they get started?
A: I think the only way to answer that is in the form of platitudes. The way for that to happen is to be those values. As a leader, you have to emanate those things, and that’s very hard to do if you don’t feel it. Start-up businesses make hundreds of decisions every day; about how to build their foundation, and build their brand, and you do it implicitly. That happens in hundreds of ways: little decisions towards employees, vendors, customers, you name it. In order to consistently make good decisions, you have to really have a very strong compass about what you believe and are trying to accomplish. It’s helpful to write it down and be very, very specific and honest about yourself and making it your manifesto.

But you have to do that in a rigorous way. You can’t stand for motherhood and apple pie, it has to be very specific. And then, you have to run everything you do through that filter. That functions, again, if you feel it. If you don’t feel it and don’t make those decisions the right way, it’s very, very hard to not swerve off the road. It becomes a place where you’re you’re not anywhere near what you thought you were.

Q: So what are those tenets for Pandora?
A: Our mission is to play only music you’ll love. Within that, I think the culture of the company is to treat each other with a great amount of respect, to value musicians, value the art they create, and to never profit from a business that doesn’t respect them. There are probably a dozen or so, but those are the most foundational.

Q: You’re an incredibly busy guy. You’re a top executive at a rapidly growing technology start-up, and there are certainly lots of other things you could spend your time on. Why do you prioritize spending time out in the world above other ideas?
A: I think there’s actually nothing more important I could do than what I do. Now, it’s hard to quantify its value in the short turn. If I go to Biloxi, Mississippi, do we get a huge surge of listeners from Biloxi? Not really.

On the other hand, I think Pandora is what it is today because of activities like what I do, as a brand. We have a very transparent relationship and very explicit bargain with listeners: we’ll respect you and you’ll sign up for the value chain that allows us to exist, including advertising and whatever else. To sustain and nurture that bargain, you have to talk to people. They need access to you, and you need to listen to them. If you do that genuinely and sincerely, that audience will sustain you when you really need them.