This afternoon at Web 2.0, Pandora Co-founder Tim Westergren sat down with Fortune Editor Adam Lashinsky to talk about what’s going on at everybody’s favorite personalized radio platform. Pandora recently enjoyed a relatively high profile IPO, putting the “P” ticker symbol in “IPO”. The company has grown to 37 million active users and, as Westergren has said multiple times, has finally hit scale.
Part of the reason that the co-founder believes that the company has been able to hit scale, and continue to grow across mobile and web platforms, is that the entire industry is shifting from broadcast, terrestrial radio to personalized radio.
Of course, Westergren would prefer this shift to be endemic, as Pandora has really been at the forefront of pushing personalized radio across different forms of media. And, at least from looking at mobile, where Pandora reaps 70 percent of its users, it doesn’t look like Westergren his wearing rose-colored glasses.
An interesting statistic that he mentioned today was that Pandora currently has over 900,000 songs in its repertoire, and the majority of those songs were played last month — one of the biggest differences between traditional and new radio. The diversity of the catalog is far bigger, exposing listeners to more artists, more songs, and giving artists, in turn, a far broader reach than ever before. Essentially, new radio is helping the long-tail, playing more songs, and, hey, its value proposition goes further for artists: They pay royalties to performers. Terrestrial (or broadcast) radio only pays publishing fees, which go to composers and record labels, but not performers.
