Pandora Visits The D.C. Music Scene

In wanting to further refine his ability to predict what new music might appeal to you based on your current tastes, Tim Westergren, founder of the amazing streaming music service Pandora.com has spent the spring traversing the U.S. hosting town hall-style meetings to discover new and legendary artists and sounds at the grass roots level, taking in local venues and bands along the way. For the curious of the lot, Pandora is the webcast interface of the Music Genome Project, Westergren’s 10,000+ artist database which has rated over 100,000 songs drawing from all genres based on 400 different musical attributes such as tempo, instrumentation and vocal styles. Using this database, Westergren created an algorithm which takes your music preferences and returns other artists in the database with similar musical qualities (hear Tim describe how Pandora works in this podcast interview courtesy of TWiT.tv). So, if you’re a big Barry Manilow fan, Pandora can help you find other artists featuring blues influences, jazz influences, demanding vocal performances, acoustic sonority, and major key tonality to take you to your happy place.

In other words, with Pandora, you’re the decider.

But Pandora, as amazing as it already is, wants to get better. And tonight, Westergren will be making a stop in the District, joined by Gary Greenstein of the independent nonprofit performance rights organization Soundexchange and David D. Oxenford, a music copyright lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine to discuss the impact of the digital revolution on the future of music, and learn more about the local scene with D.C. music fans at AU's Greenberg Theatre. We must note that the location is different from the Revolution Records location which was the originally scheduled venue.