More on Pandora Event...

Ok, so maybe I was a bit harsh in my post prior to the Pandora event, but come on, I do help companies put on events for a living, so it's a pet peeve for me.

Tim Westergren, the founder, is really an impressive guy.

A passionate musician, at one point, back in 2000, he decided that he was going to begin the Music Genome Project, to identify the characteristics (across 30 'music chromosomes') that make up each piece of music.

A trained musician listens to EVERY SINGLE recording and then scores it. That goes into the database.

What Pandora has built is a highly sophisticated interactive and learning music experience.

I love the service (the average person tells 6 people...guess I'm not average since I've told about 300!) and the story behind it (he had people working for 2 years without salaries; he went to 350 different venture capital firms to pitch his idea [#348 was the magic number])

You just have to love this American Dream story, perseverance, belief in your product.

Tim's on a "listening tour of America" just to get feedback from his biggest fans [I'm proud to be one] and it's clear that he's doing just that.

They have 8.5 million US members now and I'm sure it'll go much higher [soon, it'll be on phones and then who knows what?] And all of this with NO marketing expenditures at all.

A bit of a shaky start, but he made up for it BIG time and is truly an inspirational guy (and fortunately doesn't have an ego as big as his membership).

I've long said that music is the bellwether of the Internet and once again, we see the walls being broken down.

And to show Tim how much I love his service, I added the Pandora My Station widget to my sidebar. Check it out.