We've started a special page on Pandora so that fans across the country can follow the series. Check out www.pandora.com/pandorapresents to see some of the special content, such as behind the scenes interviews, thoughts from fans, and special mixtapes that are curated by the featured band, including Portugal. The Man and the first band of the series, Dawes.

Our first show was held in Portland, Oregon, on December 13. There will be more shows to come throughout this year, so stay tuned for the next city and band announcement.

We're really looking forward to tonight's show (which is brought to our fans for free, courtesy of Budweiser). If you don't have a pass for tonight's show, a few have been set aside to give away at the door at 7 p.m. Get there early if you'd like to join us for an awesome night.

- Tim (Founder)

A really large crowd showed up, loaded with lots of questions and comments:

There were many questions about how we decide what music goes in Pandora, and on how artists are paid - including from a number of musicians whose music is on Pandora. There were also questions and suggestions about advertising on our site - is it targeted? For example, one married attendee asked about the frequency of dating site ads...I assured her this wasn't a hint of any kind!

Pandora is very conservative on this issue, and it is heartening that our listeners also have a pragmatic attitude about the business benefits - good thing considering how Pandora works!

Folks also had a lot of questions about specific stations (Allman Band, Led Zeppelin, flamenco music...) with an equal mix of complaints and compliments - one thing that our attendees learned, as did I, is that our suggestion option isn't as obvious as it could be. Need to fix that.

I was particularly struck by the number of people who were interested in Pandora's relationship to the local community, and how we see community work and philanthropy in terms of our company's mission. That's a major topic inside Pandora right now. We've been doing a lot, but are thinking strategically about how to expand. Oakland definitely has a lot of community pride. It's great to finally be able to meaningfully contribute to our community.

Really heartwarming question from someone to close off the evening: "how can we be better listeners?" Pretty cool :)

Tim (Founder)

With this service, businesses can effortlessly personalize their in-store music program to match their environment and brand, and create the perfect in-store and in-office sound for you, their customers.

The next time you're settling into the dentist chair or - much better - sidling up to a bar, ask them if they're playing Pandora. If they're not, you can tell them to check it out here: www.dmx.com/pandora

- Jessica

In spite of rain and a Brewers playoff game we had a full house (though we ended in time for folks to see the last few innings, Brewers leading by one).

Lots of great conversation as usual, including quite a bit of discussion about the advertising on Pandora. Listeners clearly have a desire to find different ways to interact with the ads - book marking them, saving for later, expressing preferences on their favorite kind of ads, etc.

It was really interesting to survey listeners on their usage. In a show of hands, a substantial majority listened to Pandora on smartphones, and a substantial majority of them listened to it in the car. That's a serious trend for us. That number looked very different a year ago.

There also continues to be an appetite for greater control over station curation - ie. being able to control individual attributes. This group was clearly a group of power users!

A great visit.

Tim (Founder)

I had the rare treat of meeting with, and presenting Pandora and the Music Genome Project to the scientist who actually discovered DNA, Dr. James Watson. He's a wonderful man with an obvious curiosity, and some very strong opinions about Chinese opera!

Had a terrific time touring the Cold Spring Harbor facility out on Long Island, where a global assembly of some of the world's brightest natural scientists come together to do bench research. We convened for a town hall in a seminar room full of biologists and their friends to talk Genome.

It was certainly an unusual town hall with a whole new set of questions around the science and implications of the Music Genome Project.

One comment that really struck me was the idea of inserting random songs into stations to see if it would generate a spontaneous and random improvement - just like a genetic mutation! It's a really interesting notion, after all, that's the process that has defined human evolution for thousands of years.

Looking forward to our Milwaukee town hall tomorrow night (10/13) at the Iron Horse Hotel.

Tim (Founder)

Enjoy!

Tim (Founder)

To that end, for several years now we've had an extensive engineering and business effort underway to bring Pandora into vehicle dashboards - and it's now starting to bear fruit, with Pandora-enabled cars and trucks actually hitting the showrooms.

We're currently partnered with 11 of the world's most well-known automotive brands and many aftermarket manufacturers and have had a steady stream of vehicle launches over the last few months. We thought it would be useful to pull together a list of the car companies and car audio manufacturers whose products support Pandora...just in case you're in the market for a new ride or you're retrofitting your sound system.

• BMW
• MINI
• Buick
• Chevrolet
• GMC
• Ford
• Lincoln
• Hyundai
• Mercedes-Benz
• Scion
• Toyota
• Alpine Electronics
• JVC
• Kenwood
• Pioneer
• Sony

These auto integrations rely on the Pandora application that you have running on your smartphone today. When you hook up your phone with your car and launch Pandora, the popular controls of the Pandora service - like station selection and thumbs feedback - shift into the vehicle dashboard so you don't have to fiddle with your phone to enjoy and interact with Pandora while driving. That way, as our auto partners have been known to say, you can "keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road" while enjoying your Pandora stations.

We'll do our best to keep listeners informed of the latest automotive launches. Our ambition is to have Pandora built into every model of every car - making personalized radio just as ubiquitous and easy to use as traditional broadcast radio. There's much more to come.

I do hope you have the opportunity to enjoy personalized radio in the car. It's a simple, yet transformational experience!

- Jessica

In late 2010 we started with a clean sheet of paper, challenging ourselves to create a new internet radio experience that was fast, social, and easy while still being familiar to the tens of millions of people that listen to Pandora each month.

The result is "New Pandora" -- the same personalized radio experience you've enjoyed for years, wrapped in a new HTML5 look that makes it more responsive, easier to use, and better integrated with the friends and music lovers in your life. We also think it looks more beautiful than ever, but we're biased.

For the last two months we've been gradually rolling a preview of the new site out to our listeners, taking their feedback, fixing bugs and making improvements here and there. With all those little fixes and refinements in place, today we're rolling out the new site for everyone.

Some of our new features include:

Simplified Station Creation - Enhanced auto-complete choices and personalized suggestions make creating new stations and discovering new music or comedy more intuitive and personal.

Discovery of Music with Friends - Enhanced listener profiles and a new music feed offer a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora. The music feed will roll out slowly over the course of the coming days. In addition to the prominent new "share" button, stations now have their own URLs, making it super easy for listeners to share favorite stations via Twitter, Facebook, or email.

Improved Control - Prominent and ubiquitous access to familiar player control buttons including Play, Pause, Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down icons helps listeners to easily personalize their music and comedy stations. A new shuffle feature also allows listeners to shuffle any collection of stations to add variety to their listening experience.

Enhanced Artist Information - An option to learn more about the music, find lyrics, read artists' biographies and expand the album art size.

Unlimited listening - We've removed the 40 hours listening cap - you can now listen as much as you want for free.

The new social feed will roll out over the next few days to everyone and we want to remind you that you control of how others see your Pandora profile page and listening activity. Here's a link to view and to edit your privacy settings. http://www.pandora.com/#/account/privacy

We'd love to hear what you think of our latest project. To let us know what you think, to get help, or to find answers please visit http://help.pandora.com.

When we welcome artists to our office, the first stop is typically a high-level behind the scenes look at the Music Genome Project, and we provide some detailed insights about how their music in our collection is analyzed and played. It's really intriguing for us — and for the artist — to go over how the Music Genome Project really works, and it's fascinating to discuss with artists the musical attributes we've identified in their work. We have an opportunity to hear them talk about their vision for those compositions when they wrote and recorded them. Then we get to hear them play live! It's great.

Before we wrap the visit, there's a sit-down for a recorded Q&A to hear stories about their music and career. In addition to our "day" jobs, many of us here at Pandora are musicians by trade. The musician-to-musician discussions that unfold in the post-performance Q&A give us the chance to learn about the artists' formal training, practice regimens, stories about the best of times and the worst of times, and advice the artists would give to children of their own about pursuing a career in music.

You can see this for yourself - we've posted our interview with Raphael Saadiq:

The visits have been really special for us here at Pandora. They remind us of the impact that radio makes for artists connecting with new fans, and the unique role that Pandora plays in those introductions by making radio a personalized discovery experience. We're excited to welcome additional artist guests in the coming months and share them with you.

- Jessica

Executive Vice President of Business and Corporate Development

Right now, every Pandora One subscriber has the option to use the redesigned web version of Pandora. All you need to do is visit us at http://www.pandora.com, login to your Pandora One account, and look for the invitation to use the new site across the top of the page. Don't forget to send us your feedback to support@pandora.com. We'd love to hear what you think.

We'll start rolling out the new site to our ad-supported listeners during the next few weeks. While we're delighted with the look of the new site, we are even more excited about the new opportunities for listener interaction, music discovery, and easier navigation. As millions more listeners are poised to try out the new Pandora.com soon, we're looking forward to hearing what you have to say and incorporating your feedback as well.

Thanks for listening,

Tom Conrad
CTO and EVP of Product

Today marks the beginning of a phased rollout that will take place over the coming weeks and months. Our goal is to use this period to get your feedback about the new site and to polish things up so they're perfect for the full launch later this year. We'll take the next week or so to listen to your initial comments and feedback and I'll be back to post more about the new Pandora next week.

It's a very proud moment for all of us, and we've all paused for a moment to take it all in. A number of us were on Wall Street to witness the opening day, and we've celebrated the moment with our teams all across the country. It's really something to see people actually start to buy stock in your company. Pretty cool!

Most importantly though, this represents an encouraging sign about our hopes for building an enduring and impactful company. "Going public" is really a means to an end. It allows us to do even more of what we've been doing and to bring even more resources to bear on our mission of enabling people to enjoy music they know and discover music they love... and to help musicians find their audiences and build careers. Music is continuing to go through a major transformation - and no more so than in radio as it shifts from a broadcast world to unicast, personalized radio. We have a rare opportunity in front of us to influence the way people connect with music and to create a healthy music industry - one that is more inclusive of working artists and more expansive in the listening audience it serves. It's an ambitious goal, but we think it's an important one, and an achievable one.

We have many, many people to thank for our progress so far: investors who gave us the resources to get started; great advertisers and forward-thinking agencies who have recognized Pandora's potential and embraced our platform in these early days; an amazing group of business partners - from car companies to consumer electronics to smartphone manufacturers for building so many great devices to deliver Pandora anytime/anywhere (and to the amazing networks that make that possible); labels and artists who continue to send us fantastic records everyday across hundreds of genres; and of course to our listeners who have been the lifeblood of Pandora, spreading the word about our service to friends and providing a nonstop stream of invaluable feedback. Not a day goes by that we aren't grateful for every part of this ecosystem, of which we are now a part.

So we look forward with great anticipation, ambition and a healthy dose of humility to the years ahead. It's a wonderfully exciting time and we're very thankful to have this opportunity.

Now, back to work!

Tim (Founder)

Dear Listeners -

We're excited to say that we are officially in the business of telling jokes! Starting now, you can launch personalized comedy stations on Pandora from any genre or comedian.

Adding comedians to the mix has been one of the top requests from our listeners, so we've taken the same approach to comedy as we have to music: carefully and deliberately analyzing comedic "bits" across a very large number of attributes to capture the style, delivery and content of each performance. It's been a very fun experience, taking what we've learned in music and applying it to a whole new category. Now, instead of talking about "minor keys," "falsetto," and "extensive vamping," our comedy-analysts capture "odd juxtaposition" (A horse walks into a bar...), "misdirection" and "spoonerisms" (a well-boiled icicle, instead of a well-oiled bicycle)...

We've had a great team of working comedians furiously analyzing what is now a collection of more than 10,000 sketches from more than 700 different comics and counting.

As with music, we hope that the Comedy Genome Project will let people enjoy comedy they know as well as discover new talent that they love. And for comedians everywhere we hope that Pandora can provide a great big new platform for new fans. There is surely nothing more important than helping the world laugh a little more!

We hope you'll give it a whirl. Here are some quick options to get you started if you need some: Comedy Genres.

And, as always, don't be shy about feedback, we love to hear from you.

Enjoy!

Tim (Founder)

Tom (Chief Technology Officer)

Jason DeRulo stops by to get a plaque to commemorate our 10 Billionth Thumb.

Just over a week ago, on Sunday, April 24th at 4:46pm, "Ridin' Solo" by Jason DeRulo received Pandora's 10 billionth thumb. 10 BILLION...wow!

Of the many milestones we've hit over the past 6 years, this is perhaps the one that makes us most proud. We created Pandora to bring personalization to radio, to allow each individual to determine the sound of their stations, and to make it as simple and intuitive as possible. There is no greater evidence for us of meeting that objective than the ongoing engagement you have all shown in your use of the thumbs.

Not a day goes by that we don't work to improve how the Music Genome Project works. And there is no greater impact on the project's development than the contribution you are all making, one thumb at a time, to our understanding of how to build great playlists. Our team -- musicians, mathematicians, statisticians, radio programmers, software engineers, music lovers and more -- absorbs the feedback from you daily, looking for new insights and adjustments that your contributions reveal.

What started as an improbable effort by a group of musicians, around a dining room table, is now a massive project, involving tens of millions of avid music fans. Little by little we are all collectively creating a music discovery engine that might just deliver on the grand promise of the web -- a completely personalized listening experience for every user, and an effective outlet for tens of thousands of deserving artists. We now have over 800,000 songs in our collection, and over 95% of them play in a given month.

All of us are humbled by the continued engagement you have shown with Pandora, not only with your thumbs, but also your general advice, suggestions, and critiques...by the thousands. We listen intently. And it is all adding up.

We will continue to work every day to get better, as this task has no end. And that's what makes this so much fun.

Thanks again for being a part of this.

Tim (Founder)

P.S. That 10 billionth thumb was, indeed, a thumb-up. ☺

I'm writing to wish you a very Happy New Year from all of us here at Pandora! And what a year it was...

First, a heartfelt thanks to all of you for continuing to be such engaged listeners and such wonderful evangelists. In 2010 we doubled our audience to over 75 million people! And that was mostly thanks to continued word of mouth. For that we are deeply appreciative.

As always, interacting with listeners continues to be our greatest joy, and greatest source of feedback. You now send us over 25,000 emails every month. What an incredible fountain of information, constructive feedback, and validation that continues to be... and those thumbs! In 2010 alone, you thumbed over 3 billion songs (mostly thumbs-up... phew!).

Getting your stations right continues to be our obsession - and a work in progress. It's a (wonderfully) hard problem and something we continue to work on every day. Your feedback is invaluable to that effort.

I hope you've checked out one of the many new connected devices that now support Pandora. We're trying our best to make Pandora available everywhere you might want to use it. And that includes cars. 2011 will bring more options than ever to listen to Pandora on the road, beyond just plugging your smartphone into an auxiliary jack. Ford, GM, Mercedes-Benz, Mini and Toyota have all announced Pandora integration into their dashboards. There's no way to describe what it's like to have personalized radio in the car. You just have to try it.

Last, but not least, a shout-out to all the great new music from working artists everywhere. Keep your submissions coming. We're furiously adding music so listeners can keep discovering. The Music Genome Project surpassed 850,000 songs and is now rapidly becoming a more international collection.

So much more to say... but we've got the whole year ahead of us to talk :).

Please stay in touch, keep listening and I look forward to the music we're all going to enjoy in 2011.

As always, your feedback is most welcome.

Tim
Founder