Three weeks ago, Tim Westergren, founder and CSO of Pandora.com and the Music Genome Project, paid a visit to Washington, D.C. to sample some local music and hold a town fair discussion at AU’s Greenberg Theater on the contemporary state of music licensing and artist reimbursement. Westergren was joined by Gary Greenstein of the independent nonprofit performance rights organization Soundexchange and David D. Oxenford, a music copyright lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine, and led an interactive and intimate conversation with about 100 Pandora fans detailing the short but arduous history of Pandora and how he hopes to shift the ratio of compensation in favor of recording artists.

Greenstein and Oxenford shared some insight into the economics of paying artists each time their songs are played and it’s not pretty. Did you know that for commercial broadcast or webcasts, artists earn $0.000762 per performance? That’s 0.0762 CENTS each time the song is played on a single radio station! Or $0.0088 per aggregate tuning hour? Yes, one spin on commercial radio or webcast does not make one a millionaire, nor do several thousand for that matter. And according to Westergren, artists only receive 2.5 cents of the 99 cents it costs you to download a song on iTunes. However, he made it clear that he hopes Pandora, by locating music you are more likely to enjoy and thus more likely to purchase, and by holding frank discussions like the very forum in which he spoke addressing the distribution of profits earned from music sales, can one day make broadcasting music more profitiable for recording and performing artists. Westergren truly aspires to revolutionize the music industry and hopes one day being a musician can be a stable and profitable career for all performers.

DCist recently caught up with Westergren to discuss Pandora’s development and how his national roadtrip is coming along. Check out the interview below the fold.