Newsweek profiles Pandora in its latest issue.
Pandora works by asking you to pick your favorite artists and then programs a radio station for you. You can tweak the selections by giving thumbs up or down to a tune (when a Ratt song stuck its snout into a session, I exterminated it quickly) or by adding a new artist to the mix. One of the songs may well introduce you to a great band you never heard of—or it may expose the fact that you have a recessive musical gene for something completely unexpected. Westergren sometimes gets searing missives from rock snobs who are outraged that Pandora had concluded they might like Céline Dion. ("It's a social objection," he says. "So what if she's doing Las Vegas—she can sing!") The ad-supported site went public last November, and Westergren says he has more than 2 million users.
