MIAMI — The fast-talker in the plaid shirt flashes with inspiration.
“I know what mood I’m in. So, so, you could have a color dial! So, you have red, blue. So, I’m in an angry mood — red. Blue? I’m just chillin’ out with a glass of wine.”
(Michel du Cille/The Washington Post) - When Pandora listeners talk to Westergren, he hears opinions on how he could improve the product. When Westergren talks to the listeners, he sometimes is sending a message to Washington.
Tim Westergren nods. He smiles. A hmmm-lemme-think-about-that-one sort of smile. Now here comes a matronly sort with a stack of CDs. Easily twice the age of the fast-talker. Medicare-eligible, she says. She can’t sleep. The CDs help. She shuffles them into Westergren’s hands. Play them, she pleads.
And they keep coming. A dozen, two dozen. More. A willowy, 20-something hipster who says his profession is “socialite.” A retired nurse with a thing for Eric Clapton. That kid with the skateboard.
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. 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.
He’s still talking half-an-hour after the meeting ends, encircled by listeners snapping smartphone pics. Still talking as the band playing the club that night starts its set. 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.
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. Jeans and baggy, long-sleeve T-shirts are more his style.
Westergren’s squabble over royalties has chafed at raw spots in a music world wary of artists getting scammed. There have been recriminations and accusations, dissing and dishing. Once Westergren embodied nothing more than the struggling musician, the long-shot entrepreneur. 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. This is how the game gets played at this level, when you’ve made it, when you matter. Will it be Musician Tim or Wall Street Tim?
Internet radio pays artists exponentially more for each song played than satellite and cable radio — services such as SiriusXM, Music Choice and Muzak. Pandora has long sought to alter that imbalance. Westergren wants Congress to lower the amount Pandora pays — arguing that the reduction would leave more money to innovate and expand its business. 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. They might even someday create a “musician’s middle-class,” he argues.
A 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.
