Tim Westergren started the Music Genome Project after years spent looking for a career in which he could use his love of music. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he toured the U.S. in various bands. This experience showed him firsthand how hard it was for musicians to build up an audience. Then, in the the 1990s, while writing music for film and television, he developed his skill in determining the musical tastes of others. Using this skill, he founded Pandora Internet Radio, where users can create customized stations.
Users create customized stations using a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" rating. Pandora uses these ratings in an algorithm to match the attributes in a chosen song to other songs with similar attributes. In this way, users can become familiar with a wide variety of music they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to hear. It's not only well-known artists who get heard but relatively unknown artists as well.
Nolan Gasser is considered the architect of the Music Genome Project. He is the chief musicologist, as well as an accomplished composer and pianist. He began working with Tim in 2000, when Westergren was looking for graduate students to help with his new technology company. Together they used musical analysis and database technology to engineer this new method for Internet users to create stations streaming the kind of music they specifically want to hear.
As of July 2011, Pandora Internet Radio had 100 million registered users with over 36 million of them active users. The company had increased its market share to 3.6 percent of all radio listeners in the United States. In 2011 the Music Genome Project added comedy to its list of analyzed content. Pandora's free personalized service is used in consumer electronic devises including smartphones, TVs and tablets. Pandora is currently working on implementation in automobiles.