By: James Adams

}  Pandora is an automated internet radio provider which creates playlists based off of musical similarities and feedback from the users.

}  1999: Founded as Savage Beast Technologies by Tim Westergren and friends

}  July 21, 2005: Restructured and renamed Pandora Media

}  June 15, 2011: Began trading at $16/share

}  April 2013: 200+ million users

}  After 13 years and 175 million users, Pandora has yet to turn a profit. The new CEO, Brian McAndrews, plans to change that…

Music Genome Project

}  Each song represented by a vector of 400 attributes (“Genes”)

}  Each “Gene” assigned value between 0-5 in half integer increments

}  Similarity in songs calculated with distance function

Congress Actually Saved Pandora Bill passed in 2007 forces internet-based radio services to pay around double the royalty rate than satellite providers. Congress passed a bill allowing Pandora more time to negotiate royalty rates with SoundExchange in 2009 which allowed the company to continue to operate.

The Good }  Just purchased $8 million in internet-radio

patents from Yahoo!

The Bad }  Locked-in licensing rates with record labels ends

in 2015.

The Verdict }  Competition from iTunes Radio and Spotify will

prove to great }  Future is bleak