Sonos. Wow.

We’ve been working with the team at Sonos for about 6 months to get the Pandora Everywhere experience on their family of devices. During that time I’ve of course had the chance to listen to a Sonos here in the office a fair bit as we iterated together on builds. What I wasn’t able to do was to experience it in my own home. That all changed 48 hours ago when I setup my own multi-room Sonos system.

Best. Thing. Ever.

I’m a huge fan of Slim Devices and have been a very, very happy Slim customer for many years (going all the way back to their very first device the SliMP3). They’re a great company with a great team building really neat devices. But at the end of the day they really play at different places in the market than Sonos. The Squeezebox is more affordable device than the Sonos and the Transporter is at the very high end really targeted at the kind of people that pay ten grand for a CD player.

So, getting back to Sonos… this is a really delightful product. Incredibly easy to setup. I managed to configure a multi-room solution with Rhapsody, Pandora, and our own library of music in about 15 minutes and that included a round of firmware upgrades to take advantage of their latest feature (Pandora!).

The implementation of multi-room is the killer app for Sonos. It’s just flawless. I’m convinced that my home music use is going to skyrocket thanks to this. It’s also by far the best way to use Rhapsody (finally the $13/month makes sense to me). The Pandora implementation is also fantastic. I can’t wait to get back home and play with it some more.

Let’s start at the beginning

When I moved this blog over from blogger the rationale was to gear up to tell the Pandora product story — at least my perspective on it. With our new product launch out the door, and things generally starting to quiet down here at Pandora central, I suppose I should start to make good on my threat to tell the tale. Here goes. Screaming into the void (hi mom!) and all that…

The Beginning

This story begins for me back in May of 2004.

I’d been the VP of Engineering since late 2000 at a company called Kenamea that was building a kind of AJAX framework designed to help people build rich internet applications. This was of course before these kinds of solutions had a name (Jesse James Garrett didn’t use the AJAX term publicly until Feb of 2005, nearly a year after I left Kenamea). Kenamea had been a tough road; trying to get enterprise customers to see the opportunities created by rich internet applications.

I was very ready to go to work on a consumer application and work on solving some problem that I had in my own life. As I started to think about what it was I wanted to invest myself in, I quickly came to the conclusion that it had to be something to do with music. Like many, I’d spent an unspeakable number of hours ripping and tagging my CD collection in iTunes and was left disappointed with how little that iTunes (at least in 2004) did to leverage that wealth of musical information. It seemed to me that there was a bunch of interesting opportunities around helping people connect with artists that they’d like by tapping into the iTunes-collected metadata.

So, I set to work cooking some ideas of my own about a consumer music service built around recommendation and tight integration into the iTunes “view” of the your musical taste. In the middle of this I took a trip down to Indio, CA for the ’04 Coachella music festival (The Cure, The Pixies, and Radiohead!). In a very lucky stroke I bumped into a high school friend and I started telling him about some of my music recommendation ideas. He said “One of my good friends just went to work for a little company in Oakland that’s working on some of those same problems. You should call her.”

I did.

Pandora started out as a company called Savage Beast. The company got its start in January of 2000 founded by Tim Westergren, Will Glaser, and John Kraft. Tim was the music guy, Will was the technology guy, and John was the business guy. By the time I arrived on the scene in 2004, John was long gone and Tim had taken on the mantle of both “business guy” and “music guy.”

When I first met the Savage Beast team, there were 5 engineers, the two remaining founders, a just-hired VP of Business Development and a handful of music analysts. The were spread across two floors in a pretty miserable building in Oakland. Crammed into the tiniest spaces you can imagine.

The company had been busy building the Music Genome Project for the last 4 years and was focused on selling access to the Genome to pretty much any large consumer company that played in the music space. Tower, Best Buy, Borders, and AOL were all customers. The company had just raised its first real round of venture funding and the technical founder and CTO Will was looking for a VP of Engineering to build out and manage the engineering team as the company took on new projects post fund raising. In all honesty they were calling the position VP of Engineering, but what they really needed was an engineering manager. So goes it in the early stage startup world.

I came in for a round of interviews — it was in fact the very first company I’d talked to after deciding to leave Kenamea — and immediately fell in love with the team. A great group with a fascinating approach to the music recommendation problem. None-the-less, I was reluctant. These were the first people I’d talked to, and the actual position they were hiring for wasn’t a perfect fit for me. I’d played a strategic role at Kenamea and I wasn’t entirely sure I was ready to take a job that was 99% engineering tactics (hire the team, keep them happy, hit the release dates as promised, repeat). I was also looking for something that was a direct-to-consumer play, and they were pretty resolutely in the B2B space.

They offered me the job, and I decided to keep looking.

About six weeks went by. I went to Alaska and kayaked for 10 days with my Dad. I met with a bunch of cool early stage companies. I thought more about starting my own music recommendation company. But for some reason my thoughts kept going back to the little rag-tag team in Oakland.

Then my phone rang; it was Will again. While they’d been talking to other candidates they kept coming back to the idea that I was the right guy for the job. They made me another offer and this time I accepted. I was the new VP of Engineering at Savage Beast.

Welcome to April 28th, 2003

It took over four years, but at long last my disposable income is now entirely at risk to the iTunes store. Since well before the store launched in ’03, the principal way that I listen to music at home is via a Squeezebox or a Sonos. Neither one of course can play FairPlay DRM’d tracks. As a result I’ve been pretty much completely cut off from the iTunes universe. Sure I have an iPod but the idea of buying music that wouldn’t play on my home stereo was never appealing to me. Sure I understand that I could go through the whole burn-re-rip thing but who wants to deal with that. So throughout the entire digital music revolution I’ve been buying CD’s from Amazon. With the launch of DRM-free tracks on iTunes today I can finally purchase digital music. So far, even with just one label on board, it’s been an expensive shift — I’ve bought 4 full albums so far. I’m sure if there were other labels available I’d have bought more. I know I’m far from the typical music consumer, but this really is a game-changer for me.

Congrats to the Last.fm Gang

The big news in music web-dom today is the CBS acquisition of Last.fm. I’ve frequently talked about my affection for last, and I really am happy to see them “exit” at a valuation that should be good for the entire team. Last is truly remarkable at getting great features out into their communities hands. It’s a great site with tons of really interesting content and conversations. I wish them continued success as they move into their latest chapter.

Facebook Platform

We weren’t the only company to announce a platform last week. I’ll leave it to others to judge the importance of our announcement, but the more I look at what Facebook has done the more I become convinced that this is very big news, and an incredibly smart play.

The whole idea that the web needs a social platform feels very right to me. It’s ridiculous to have to re-create your social network on each and every site you encounter (flickr, linkedin, flixster, last.fm, and on and on). To have Facebook step forward and say “ok, we’re the open social network platform, come deploy your apps here against our plumbing” feels like it addresses a very real set of consumer desire.

Sure on a philosophical level it feels like the closed nature of this is perilously close to the CompuServe/Prodigy/AOL pre-Internet days and I do hope that there’s a day where some kind of open standard for these kinds of social connections solves the problem in a truly open way (FOAF++?) but until then I think Facebook has nailed it. And with 28MM engaged users they have exactly the momentum they need to be successful. I think there’s a good chance we’ll all look back at last Thursday’s announcement as the moment when Facebook truly stepped into their $2B shoes. Frankly, I suspect they’re already worth quite a bit more than that.

I think the interesting question is what happens to all the niche social networks? Sure, they can all move into a new home inside Facebook, but they’ll have to be careful to maintain some element of protectable IP. Let’s say for example that you’re a community focused around the love of movies. You move into Facebook with the new platform and start growing by leaps and bounds. How do you differentiate yourself from others with access to the same content (movie reviews, etc)? Seems tricky. Let’s say you go it on your own (don’t give your community over to the Facebook world), then how do you get people into your network? I sure would rather use a movie “app” that was deeply integrated into Facebook platform than one that wasn’t. Seems like a tricky place to be as a vertical social network. If you plug in you risk losing your real value (your network) but if you try to stay outside you miss out on the what I think will be a viral machine the likes of which we’ve not seen before. Sure seems that the social networking scene may turn out to be a winner takes all kind of situation. Should be fun to watch how all this plays out.

Pandora Everywhere

Well the event tonight went really well – we certainly had a great time – and the news is out:

Gizmodo

TechCrunch

TechCrunch on the Zing/Pandora Prototype

Scoble

GigaOm

PC Magazine

San Francisco Chronicle

And here is the news in our own words:

The Pandora Everywhere Platform

Pandora for Sprint

Pandora for Sonos

Pandora Website Redesign

24 hours to go

We’re down to the wire and all the final pieces are falling into place. Tomorrow night about this time we’ll be taking the stage to start making our announcements. Some really fun stuff coming; a long time in the making. Can’t wait to get it out there and hear what you all think. Be sure to checkout Pandora tomorrow night around 10PM pacific…

When it rains it pours

Now it’s the military here and overseas blocking Pandora — this time not for copyright issues but to save bandwidth. From the official US Air Force website:

Defense Department officials are blocking access to many popular Internet sites from department-owned computers due to bandwidth issue… The sites are: youtube.com, pandora.com, photobucket.com, myspace.com, live365.com, hi5.com, metacafe.com, mtv.com, ifilm.com, blackplanet.com, stupidvideos.com and filecabi.com. read more.

We get letters every day at Pandora from our service people overseas saying that Pandora is one way they can get a taste of home, it’s part of what keeps them going, etc. Damn.

Oh Canada

More bad news on the international licensing front for Pandora.

Starting Weds May 16th, we have to block access to visitors from IP’s in Canada. We’ve been working hard with the rights-holders there to bring a legitimate Pandora service on-line for Canadians, but those conversations have come to an abrupt end. Just a week after we started blocking most of the rest of the world comes news that there simply aren’t licenses in the cards for us in Canada in the near future which leaves us with no choice but to shut down Canadian access.

This is incredibly painful. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we never wanted it to go this way. We have lots of great listeners in Canada and I’m incredibly sorry to see them go. We’ll continue to fight for licenses… the state of music copyright really is at a crossroads. What a terrible day.

About Pandora blocking international traffic

 I wrote this as a guest blog post for hubcanada.com last week, thought I’d share it here as well:

This past week, Pandora began blocking access to our radio streams for all listeners outside the US, Canada, and the UK. This is an incredibly disappointing outcome for us after more than a year of effort toward securing international licensing for Pandora.

Music licensing is a complicated topic, with at least three parties involved when each song is played. There’s the songwriter who composed the song, the label that owns the recording itself, and the performing artist.  Webcasters are legally obligated to make royalty payments that benefit all of these parties. In the United States, ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC collect royalties on behalf of the songwriters, and a clearing house called SoundExchange collects royalties for the labels and artists. With respect to the labels and artists, in the US a blanket license is provided to webcasters under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Unfortunately there is no similar blanket license for labels and performing artists in any country outside the US (most countries do however have some sort of centralized authority for songwriters — for example SOCAN in Canada). This means that making correct payments to the labels is dependent on striking a unique deal with each record label, in each country. Even where the “big four” labels are concerned you have to do a separate deal in each country — Warner “U.S.” is not the same as Warner “U.K.” Pandora plays music from thousands of labels, big and small, and thousands of artists who are not on any label. Even when you take into account the big four labels, and various indie aggregators, there are still thousands of separate deals to do in each and every country. Factor in a licensing environment that is — in general — less than friendly to digital music providers and the task becomes quite Herculean.  We have been told in no uncertain terms by the largest rights holders that we had to take this step.

Pandora is a company of musicians. It’s critically important to us that artists and composers are compensated for the music we play. That’s not the stance that all music services take, but it’s very much a part of our DNA. After well over a year of trying to strike deals that would ensure that payments were made to the right entities, it became clear that outside of Canada and the UK those deals were going to take a very, very long time. In light of that, we decided to move beyond zip-code verification and block based on IP address location. This was a very painful decision, but in the end we can’t ignore the existing legal reality.

We’ll continue working as hard as we can to obtain these licenses with the ultimate goal of delivering Pandora as a truly global service. Who knows, perhaps we’ll even see a day were the entire industry moves to a global copyright system. One can hope. In the meantime we’ll surely miss the many, many musical friends we’ve made from all over the world.