Tim Westergren

Sound engineer, composer and musician, Tim Westergren has dedicated his life to music but also to the broadcast of new artists.

Born in Minneapolis, in the northern Midwest, Tim Westergren studied composition and music theory at Stanford, the prestigious University of California, where were also famous people as Larry Page, Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer. But he spends much time at the Centre for Research in Musical Acoustics, a think tank working on the use of computers in music.

Recently graduated, Westergren devotes to his passion: music. Although his main instrument is the piano, over the years, he learned the bassoon, clarinet and drums. For ten years he traveled on the roads of the United States with a group. He met lot of excellent artists who are not famous. So he decided to become a producer, working primarily on the promotion of new talent with independent labels. Jazz player, he will deepen his musical culture, already substantial, in different genres such as classical music, rock or blues.

In January 2000 in Oakland, he founded with Will Glaser and Jon Kraft, Pandora Media. One of the first initiatives launched by the company is the "Music Genome Project". This is the beginning of a daunting task: for six years 35 musicologists will manually classify more than 10,000 artists according to their musical styles to create a huge database. They will try to isolate the "genes" (hence the project name) songs for categorize keywords, thus laying a broad typology which we can classify any piece of music function of nearly 2000 items identified by the experts of Pandora. The objective of Westergren is to introduce listeners to unknown artists that match with their tastes.

In 2006, the company opened its doors to visitors. Soon they create 6 million stations. But success takes an extra dimension with the launch of the Apple iPhone. Soon, 15 million Pandora application is downloaded but others will soon follow. In 2010, the customizable music service Pandora is available on more than 200 other media, including televisions and Blu-Ray.

Pandora Media has joined the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) June 15, 2011 (P).

Since, Tim Westergren travels in all the United States to promote Pandora and discover new musical talents one more time.