Pandora

Pandora is a U.S.-based online and mobile music recommendation and streaming service owned by Pandora Media, Inc. The company was founded in Oakland, CA, in 2000 by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren. This service grants users the option to listen to preprogrammed stations representative of virtually all genres of music, as well as stand-up comedy, or to create unique, sharable playlists via an interactive music experience in which like and dislike cues inform the Pandora software which types of music to include and exclude from a given personalized station. This entry explores Pandora’s Media Genome Project and its interactive process as well as the response to Pandora’s launch and an overview of its competitors.