When you’re Tim Westergren, and you’ve got more than 69 million active users listening to more than 1.5 billion of hours of music in a month and your product is embedded into the dashboard of 80 or so new car models, you don’t have to confine legislative lobbying to Washington (and political fund-raisers). They might even someday create a “musician’s middle-class,” he argues.Ī coalition of performers and record companies is trying to block Pandora’s plan, accusing Westergren of “double talk” and “dishonesty,” and of greedily hurting artists by trying to drastically cut the compensation they receive. Ultimately artists would benefit from the increased exposure, especially the vast number of performers who don’t get airtime on AM or FM stations, he argues. Westergren wants Congress to lower the amount Pandora pays - arguing that the reduction would leave more money to innovate and expand its business. Pandora has long sought to alter that imbalance. Internet radio pays artists exponentially more for each song played than satellite and cable radio - services such as SiriusXM, Music Choice and Muzak. Will it be Musician Tim or Wall Street Tim? This is how the game gets played at this level, when you’ve made it, when you matter. ![]() Now he’s confronted by critics who want to portray him as the guy who crossed over, the suit - even if he seldom wears one. Once Westergren embodied nothing more than the struggling musician, the long-shot entrepreneur. There have been recriminations and accusations, dissing and dishing. Westergren’s squabble over royalties has chafed at raw spots in a music world wary of artists getting scammed. Jeans and baggy, long-sleeve T-shirts are more his style. Lately, he’s prone to show up with some frequency on Capitol Hill, slipping into a blue blazer that doesn’t fit quite right and that he sometimes leaves with an in-law in Northern Virginia because he’s got no use for it back home in the San Francisco Bay Area. ![]() He’s communing directly with Pandora’s fans, but he’s directing his message as much at Washington, where he’s enmeshed in a pendulous fight over royalties that could reconfigure the way we listen to music online. Still talking as the band playing the club that night starts its set. He’s still talking half-an-hour after the meeting ends, encircled by listeners snapping smartphone pics. When Westergren talks to the listeners, he sometimes is sending a message to Washington. When Pandora listeners talk to Westergren, he hears opinions on how he could improve the product. ![]() Friends remark about Westergren’s evangelical love-embrace of his creation, and on this night he has talked until a fine film of sweat dampens his hair and forehead. They’ve all filed into a downtown blues club for a town-hall-style meeting with Westergren about Pandora, the phenomenally popular Internet radio service he founded and has willed through more than a decade of creative sparks and fizzles, serial business crises and serial bouncebacks. A willowy, 20-something hipster who says his profession is “socialite.” A retired nurse with a thing for Eric Clapton. Play them, she pleads.Īnd they keep coming. She shuffles them into Westergren’s hands. Now here comes a matronly sort with a stack of CDs. A hmmm-lemme-think-about-that-one sort of smile. Blue? I’m just chillin’ out with a glass of wine.” So, so, you could have a color dial! So, you have red, blue. The fast-talker in the plaid shirt flashes with inspiration.
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