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That's the saying inside the walls of Pandora and that's their focus. In a wide-ranging interview with Radio Ink magazine, and right before he went before his entire national sales force in California, Pandora creator Tim Westergren spoke to us about his growth model, iHeartRadio, local advertising, broadcast radio and his many town hall meetings with listeners. He also says it doesn't bother him that Bob Pittman and John Hogan constantly call his creation "just a feature" and not a business and had nothing but compliments for the Clear Channel product that will be officially released tonight in Las Vegas. We were also able to get some feedback from Pandora listeners on what they think about you guys and how your station's sound.
Westergren, who created the Music Genome Project, has morphed into a Pandora evangelist traveling the country hosting town hall research gatherings with listeners. The information he gathers is used to continually improve the product that, he says, competes directly with broadcast radio. Westergren does not consider iHeartradio his competition and says Pandora's revenue growth, which he doesn't lose sleep over, will come directly from radio. He also says he's tried iHeartRadio and considers it a well developed product.
Listen to our interview with Westergren HERE
(12/23/2011 12:29:04 AM)
The MUSIC Format is no more than a broad and generalized attempt at defining a demographic and psycho-graphic target audience.
After that, programming tunes is a fool's endeavor - always falling short in some way or another.
Given that now, audiences gets to program their own music-runs, all that's left for terra-Radio is getting involved in enhancing (training) the Talent and, as importantly - completely re-addressing the CREATIVE.
OH! This just in. I'm told the Talent has left the building? Sorry to hear that. Too bad.
Start packin'....
Interesting since analysts in the radio industry have been saying "It's the talent, stupid." for almost a decade now. I've heard some well-programmed HD-2 stations with no talent but great playlists and yet they aren't reaching critical mass. The Jack format has been having problems in several major markets. Somehow, I think it's more than just the playlist, stupid...
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