This is our first episode of Well-Rounded Radio with absolutely no music...but of course, since Pandora is a music discovery service, it makes the most sense for each of you to have your own listening experience along with this episode by setting up a station at Pandora. So, once you get your audio levels for each set up, you can listen to the interview and some music from Pandora.com.

If you’re new to Pandora, it’s free to use and easy to sign up. Visit pandora.com and all you need to divulge is your age, zip code, and an email address. For either Mac or PC users, you’ll also need to have Flash, at least version 7, which can download for free.

Apologies to our listeners outside the US; Pandora currently isn’t able to provide streaming of its service beyond the US due to rights’ licensing, but based on my conversation with Westergren, that may be coming in the future...but if non-US listeners have other similar services they are using, post a comment on them below and tell us your experience.

The roots of Pandora come from the Music Genome Project, which was started in late 1999/early 2000 by Westergren along with a group of other musicians in San Francisco to help listeners discover new music based on their existing tastes.

Analyzing millions of individual songs, Pandora essentially assigns traits to each tracks, choosing from a list of hundreds of characteristics, such as melody, harmony, form, and instrumentation so that someone who likes one song with particular attributes will get some help in discovering other songs in that vein. The listener can tell Pandora if likes each track or not, giving it a thumbs up or down...or you can simple let the service select songs on its own, ultimately taking you off in different directions and offering up music that you either might or might not already know.

Pandora's stream is 128 kilobits per second so the quality of the audio is quite good. It does, also, require a broadband Internet connection. For music fans who want to find out more about more about the service or for artists who want to learn how to submit their work for consideration, visit pandora's faq.

The word Pandora means "all gifted" which can be traced back to ancient Greek mythology, when Pandora received a variety of gifts from the Gods, including the gift of music, from Apollo. She was, so the story goes, a little on the curious side. The company behind Pandora state they want to "celebrate that virtue and have made it our mission to reward the musically curious among us with a never-ending experience of music discovery." And, as I always enjoy busting a myth, take a read through wikipedia to read how it wasn’t actually a box at all...

We recently met in Cambridge, Massachusetts while Westergren was in New England for town halls to discuss:

* what Westergren, the listeners, and the company get from his town hall gatherings.
* some of the other jobs Westergren has held over the years and helped him with creating Pandora
* what percentage of Pandora listeners are buying more music—and how many are buying less.

Photo credit: Rafael Fuchs

If you enjoyed this interview, also give a listen to interviews with Brad Powell of Calabash Music and Dave Kusek of The Future of Music book.

And I also wanted to mention a new format of show that I’ve added to the feed: it’s called the Well-Rounded Radio Mix and is an hour-long mix of "quality music from every genre" featuring independent music in the shape of a mix tape that you might give or get from a friend. Subscribe to our RSS feed to listen to the show and I’m planning on adding these to the feed each month.