Pandora's founders broke songs down like a scientist maps DNA. Their Music Genome Project tagged each track by its melody, rhythm, and voice, so the service could play you more music that sounded like the song you chose. By 2011 people were streaming those stations on phones and in cars. Pandora filed to go public as the biggest name in internet radio, carrying heavy royalty bills and a question about whether ads could ever pay them.

From Savage Beast to Radio

Will Glaser and Tim Westergren dreamed up the Music Genome Project around 1999. In January 2000 they joined Jon Kraft to found Savage Beast Technologies. The first plan was to license the music analysis to retailers as a recommendation tool. That business struggled. In 2005 the company turned to listeners directly and launched Pandora, a free internet radio service. A user typed in one artist or song, and Pandora built a station around it, learning from thumbs up and thumbs down.

A Pop, Then a Long Fade

Pandora priced its IPO at $16 a share in June 2011, almost twice the price it first expected. The stock opened at $20 and climbed to $26 before closing the day at $17.42. Spotify and Apple Music soon pulled listeners toward on-demand streaming, and royalty costs kept squeezing profits. Sirius XM took a stake in 2017. In February 2019 Sirius XM bought the rest of Pandora in an all-stock deal valued at $3.5 billion.

Cover: Pandora, Gabriel Jacques de Saint-Aubin. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for Pandora (the myth behind the name).