Jessica Steel, executive vice president of business and corporate development at Pandora Radio, discussed her role in Pandora’s road to success Nov. 15 in the Kogod Student Lounge.
The event was part of Kogod’s Alan Metzer CEO Leadership Speaker Series.
“There’s a phrase in the entertainment business that every overnight success is seven and a half years in the making,” Steel said. “This was definitely true for Pandora.”
Steel recounted the challenges that Pandora faced in its early years. Will Glaser and Tim Westergren founded Pandora in February 2000 when they developed the Music Genome Project.
This ongoing project recruits musicians, who have master’s degrees in music theory, to analyze songs and determine which types of music would appeal to people with similar tastes. They base their choices on a wide variety of factors, including which types of instruments are played in the song.
“Their job is to objectively reflect what’s happening in the music,” Steel said.
Musicians analyze each song for 20 to 30 minutes. To date, the musicians have analyzed over 800,000 songs for the project.
Users create unique stations by selecting a song or artist and then approving or disapproving the songs chosen for them.
Steel said the Music Genome Project was developed at a very fortuitous time, because people were beginning to have access to massive amounts of music and needed a way to sort through all of it.
“It was pretty clear at that point that music was going to be moving into the celestial jukebox,” Steel said. “Our founders saw that once that becomes true, the hard problem is how you connect with the stuff that aligns with your own personal taste.”
The company was originally called Savage Beast, and the founders used the Music Genome Project to sell music recommendations to large retailers like Best Buy.
The Project’s early years were very difficult, Steel said.
“We had people working for no pay for several years because they believed in the vision and the mission,” she said.
Pandora’s shot at success came in 2004, when venture capitalist Larry Marcus invested $8 million in the company with the understanding that Pandora would now begin taking its product directly to the consumer.
Steel joined the company around the same time it launched its online radio service, which now has over a hundred million registered users.
Steel attributed Pandora’s success to several strategies she and the co-founders tried over the years, including perseverance, a willingness to try new things, giving up on things that weren’t working and staying focused.
“Shortly after Pandora became popular, lots of people in the media were asking when Pandora was going to do the Book Genome Project or the Movie Genome Project,” Steel said. “We have been just about radio in the music industry for seven and half years and counting, and because we have stayed on that very narrow focused path, we have been able to amass four percent of all radio listening in the U.S.”
Steel also spoke about her personal story. She stressed the importance of self-promotion, something she said is often difficult for women.
“I’ve asked for every promotion I’ve ever gotten,” Steel said. “One of the gender differences I see is that men know how to ‘fake it till you make it.’ If men find one thing in a job description that they can apply to their experience, then they apply; if women find one thing that they can’t, then they don’t apply.”
Despite her graduate degree in feminist political theory, Steel said she did not think her gender made a major impact on her approach to her job.
“Presume that it doesn’t matter that you’re a woman,” Steel said. “I can count on one finger the amount of times I’ve been sitting around the table and felt a gender difference.”
Steel did say, however, that she was becoming increasingly aware of the importance of her actions in sending a message to other women in business. She said she realized her own relatively short four-month maternity leave had led to other women in the company also taking four months of maternity leave rather than six or more.
“My actions matter as much as my words,” she said.
