Heroes in Business - Tim Westergren CoFounder and former CEO of Pandora (sold to SiriusXM $3Billion), CoFounder Sessions Live, Music Genome Project

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

The biology of sound. Creator of the Music Genome Project, Tim Westergren Cofounder of Pandora Radio (sold to Sirius XM $3.5Billion), CoFounder of Sessions Live is interviewed by David Cogan founder of Eliances and host of the Eliances Heroes Show. Broadcast on am and fm network channels, internet radio and online syndication.

Welcome back to Alliances Heroes, where heroes in business align. To be part of our super community and find out more about Alliances, visit www.alliances.com. That's right, and welcome back. What an incredible morning. We just had on Dr. Ryan Stryzik. He is the founder of Blue Fire. It can be reached at bluefire.group. And by the way, thanks again, too. The feedback was phenomenal when I interviewed the president of Alibaba. So make sure that you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com, the only place where entrepreneurs align. All right. Our next interview is going to be incredible.

You all will have known the company that he co-founded. We have with us Tim Westergreen, co-founder and former CEO of Pandora Music, which was acquired by Sirius XM for $3.5 billion. He is the creator of the Music Genome Project. And we're going to also talk about that he is co-founder now of Sessions Live and can be reached at sessionslive.com. So, Tim, welcome to the show. We're excited to have you here today. Thank you. Good to be here.

All right. So you created this company called Pandora. Truly incredible. I mean, a lot of people use it and we are also, too, on the Pandora platform. How did you even come up with the idea of creating it? with the idea of creating it? Well, I'm a musician and I had spent my life up to that point playing in bands, writing music, writing film scores, really trying to make a go of it as a professional musician. And I spent a lot of time studying music and really all of my experiences gelled one day, really literally one day when I read an article that prompted the idea for what became the Music Genome Project, which was this approach to understanding sound and understanding what people like about music and making connections between songs. And that became a piece of software that we've developed and turned eventually into a personalized radio service. So it was an

idea at the right time in the right place. I was living in the Bay Area back then. And then I surrounded myself with really sharp technologists and musicians. And before I knew it, we had a company. You ever amazed by how many different types of music that there is out there? And it seems like a combination of sounds. And I'm by far not a musician. But I mean, ever look back and just go, wow. Yeah. I mean, the idea behind the genome project was to build this kind of foundation of musical

attributes that could essentially describe any piece of music you'd hear, uh, known and unknown and to be invented in the future. And so, yes, we, uh, we definitely wrestled with the breadth of sound, which is extraordinary, especially when you go global. I mean, the sound palette across the world is, is very, very large, but there's connections. And that's what I think has been really, what's really fun about Pandora was, you know, you'd find yourself starting with a piece of music from artists you knew. And before you knew you'd be listening to somebody halfway around the the world you'd never heard of before who had musical characteristics that your favorite artist shared.

That was part of the really joy of building it. Absolutely phenomenal. So you start Pandora and ends up being acquired by SiriusXM for $3.5 billion, yet you don't stop there. billion dollars yet you don't stop there you continue on where you know the drive to even have that did you take a break in between or just said you know what i'm rolling on to the next yeah i took some time off i spent 17 years at pandora so i definitely needed some time to decompress but i've been bit by the entrepreneurial bug. And I had unfinished business, frankly, in music, because Pandora, while it was tremendously successful as a consumer product,

the one part of the mission that we didn't quite get to was how to sort of fundamentally change the kind of economic reality of an average working musician. That's been a long-standing passion point of mine. And it's why I started Sessions. I co-founded Sessions, was really to harness the web in a way it would actually translate into meaningful and enduring income for musicians. And that's really what we're doing. So, you know, yeah, I was out for a little

while, but back in now. Truly, truly incredible. And I want you to talk to us more again, and we've got Tim Westergreen with us, co-founder, former CEO of Pandora. Talk to us about the Sessions Live specific, and again, the specific maybe target audience and what the ultimate goal is for it. Yeah, so Sessions is right now a live streaming service. So it's a place where musicians can perform live online to virtual audiences and interact with them, much like a lot of other live streaming services you see around today. But what makes sessions, I think, very unique, and we're seeing this played out, is two things. One,

we have a piece of technology that we call a growth engine that allows us to acquire audiences very efficiently. So we actually spend money and bring people to shows, all the shows. And right now I have around 3000 artists performing every week. That number is growing rapidly. And we bring audience to all these artists, known or unknown. So that's one thing. And the second thing is my co-founders are long-term gaming design, virtual game designers that really understand gamification and virtual economies so uh it's it means that we're really good at turning engagement into income which is what games great gaming's great genius was so you know sessions is this place where you can perform to an audience that we will support and drive and that will monetize well and it it's becoming a place where artists are making thousands

of dollars an hour, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single hour performing to an audience all over the world, 200 plus countries. And truly, I mean, this must be your dream of this coming and coming to fruition. Yeah, I feel incredibly fortunate. I mean, my two co-founders are brilliant

technologists, music fans too. And it's really kind of a serendipitous coming together of sort of my own background, all the things I'd done in music and the two of them from gaming and technology and live streaming is kind of the hybrid of all that. And so I think, you know, it's built for musicians from the ground up that understands musicians, understands, you know, how this would fit into music musicians' careers, what they care about, et cetera. But it's also bringing in a whole new perspective from gaming that's been lacking in music, frankly. And I think that makes sessions a pretty formidable offering. Now, Tim, you're also regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern digital music. I mean, that in itself is, I mean, did you ever think you'd be that?

And what do you do when you're regarded as that? You continue it. Well, I don't know. I'll just say, I mean, I've been at it for a while, for sure. And I think, you know, maybe one thing that's a little bit different about me is I started this off as a performer. You know, I spent my 20s playing in rock bands. I lived out of a band for a long time. I was really part of the working musician's world.

And I happened to be living in the Bay Area, which, of course, was where kind of the dot-com world was hatched, really. So I was surrounded. I was marinating in, you know, innovation and technology. And so I had the good fortune of being in that milieu. And then really the truth is that, you know, over the years at Pandora, I worked with so many really brilliant people. I'm not the only one who built that company. And, you know, I met great designers, great marketers, great product people, phenomenally talented musicians, music theorists, you know, it takes a big team to build something

like Pandora. But I do think that Pandora was very influential. I think we really broke open to the consumer web for musicians. It was the first mass consumer product in music, really, for streaming. So I think we laid the groundwork for what came later. And now, again, you've got Sessions Live. People can go to sessionslive.com. And yet you've been able to, again, with this one, be able to gain and continue to gain a lot of traction for doing that. I mean, what are some of the secrets? Because again, you've been so successful at the companies that you've started. What are some of those secrets that you could share with our audience? Yeah, I mean, a lot of things go into building a successful company. Of course, the first thing is having what they call market fit. So do you

have a product that people want and need? And that is absolutely clear with this. In some ways, COVID amplified all that. I think this need predates COVID and will be there long after, which is musicians need audiences. They need ways to make money. And no one has really solved that problem. Certainly not for the long tail of artists. So I think you need to have that.

We have that. I think you also need to have that. We have that. I think you also need to have a clear sense of purpose and mission, which this company has. You know, you have to know why you're doing this. You have to care a lot about why you're doing it. Because entrepreneurship is never a straight line, you know, between two places. And I think what keeps you going as you take lots of detours and go through various trials and tribulations is how much you care about the thing you're building. And in my years, I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, surrounded by entrepreneurs who are coming in to make money. And that's just not a recipe for success.

It's really more about finding something you love, that you care about, and that you can really commit to. So we have all that at sessions, right? something you love, that you care about, and that you can really commit to. So we have all that at sessions, right? And it's really, I have a lot of the same feeling right now that I had when Pandora was just starting to lift off. I can see all the same signals. And I feel really blessed to be able to do it again. What advice do you have for children out there really that want to grow up and make their impact in the world like you have?

I mean, you've created a brand that everybody uses. I mean, now every time I use Pandora, I'm going to be thinking of you. Well, it's funny. You know, Pandora could very easily not have been. And I had this idea for the genome product. I could have very easily put it in my pocket and never really acted on it very easily. very easily put into my pocket and never really acted on it very easily. And my, so my piece of advice to young people is pay attention to your ideas. That sounds like a really trite thing to say, but I think we're not generally encouraged when we're younger to, um, to pay attention to

original ideas we have. We're paid, we really are trained to conform. We're trained to perform on established tracks and to pursue established futures. And entrepreneurial ideas are almost definitionally crazy because they don't, they don't conform. And it's very hard to have the confidence to go pursue something that a lot of people will look at you and go,

that doesn't make any sense, but that's the looks that most entrepreneurs got of the great successful companies up to date when they started. And so my thing, you know, you will, the greatest regret you could ever have in life is having had an idea and not given it a shot. That to me is the thing you want to avoid. Well, phenomenal advice. And before we leave you today, we're in your office right now, and you've got a lot of books behind you. I need to, of course, ask you, what is perhaps one of the books that you have that's behind you in your office that you would recommend is the one must book to read? Probably Stumbling on

Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It's a wonderful sort of life philosophy, which alludes a little bit to what I just said. But his basic theory is, and he backs this up with research, he's both sort of a psychologist and a neuroscientist, a hard scientist, is that we have a very poor ability to predict what will make us happy in the future. That's, that's sort of, that's been scientifically proven.

We also have a very poor ability to remember what made us happy in the past. And yet we make almost all of our decisions based on the belief that we're good at both of those things, that we know exactly what will make us happy and we remember in the past. And as a result of that, we just make really bad, we make wrong decisions a lot. And his, I think his fundamental thesis is really thinking about right now. And I think it's about following your passion and your instinct, you know, in a moment, not not don't base it on some idea that you know, often to the future, what will make you happy. Because that's a fool's errand. The best thing you can do is follow something you care about you love right now as just as good a chance as any, you'll pick the right path i'd say more of a chance um

so yeah that's a great book uh it's a you'll re once you start you'll read it from from start to finish i'm definitely going to read it and i'm sure our listeners are too and you know what made me and it's going to make our listeners and viewers very happy is having had the opportunity to have you today to be able to be interviewed tim Tim, you've revolutionized the music with the Music Genome Project and Pandora. You're doing it again, helping musicians achieve their dreams. That's right. That's a hero. Tim Westergren, co-founder, former CEO of Pandora Music, which was acquired by SiriusXM for $3.5 billion. Please visit the Genome Project. And also, you can reach him, co-founder of Sessions Live, by going to SessionsLive.com.

This has been David Kogan with the Alliance of Heroes Show.