Pandora's Boss

Westergren knows that the quality of a band's recorded music often has little to do with its notoriety, and that imbalance is what he hopes Pandora can help correct. "I've been in a bunch of bands myself, and I've seen the arc that bands can have. There's a window there where you get the people together and find the right sound, but then what happens? Is everybody focused enough? Can everybody coordinate enough to get time off to tour, and then can everybody survive each other in a van? It's frickin' hard to make all that work."

But it's a lot easier than that to make Pandora work, once you fool around with the site a little bit. I made a classic mistake the first time I logged on about four months ago: I put in about 15 different artists from wildly different genres. "The best thing for me is to enter a song or two rather than artists," says Westergren. "My thing for radio is I like a particular sound...If you put in too many artists, it becomes like an artist-on-demand page, or like if a painter paints too many colors in one place it turns into a black blob. I try to get more specific."

Songs do indeed work better. After my "Ramblin' Man" debacle, I built a station around the Allmans' "Melissa," and instead of pop-country, Pandora sent me an assortment of Dylan, Seger, Springsteen and CCR obscurities that all featured the "country influences," "major key tonality" and "mellow rock instrumentation" I had been looking for.

And I'm not the only satisfied customer. Westergren and the company don't like to talk figures, but the site's popularity has boomed in the last few months. The very day I interviewed Westergren, a thread called "The Greatness that is Pandora.com" coincidentally popped up at the UT-Austin message board Hornfans.com.

I showed it to Westergren, who read 29 straight rave reviews of his site with a beatific smile on his face. Well, there were a couple of mild dissenters. One alt-rock fan was dismayed to hear some Nickelback mixed in with his Tool, and a hard country fan had an even stronger indictment: Pandora had mixed Kenny Chesney in with his Merle Haggard. "I'm new to Texas, but I think I could get shot for that," Westergren says with a laugh.

See, smart people are running this thing. They learn quick. Check it out.