What’s ahead for Pandora? CTO Tom Conrad talks to Mark Ramsey

Tom Conrad is the CTO of Pandora, and this conversation – from hivio 2013, the inaugural radio ideas festival – is the first public response of Pandora following Apple’s introduction of iTunes Radio.

Here are some of the questions I asked Tom:

1. How has Apple’s introduction of iTunes Radio changed the calculus for Pandora?

2. Are you personally surprised by how big Pandora has become?

3. Why has Pandora become so big and not its many competitors? What’s your secret sauce?

4. Are there any plans to add spoken work/talk content to the platform?

5. Are there any plans to add local traffic, weather and news to the platform?

6. What will the Pandora user experience be like in 3 years?

7. What plans does Pandora have to gather and aggregate deeper lifestyle information about its users allowing advertisers to target more than age, sex, location, and device?

8. Pandora offers an ad-free tier to listeners, but does promoting that ad-free tier paint ads as “evil” to advertisers and listeners alike?

Listen and watch closely when Tom announces what non-music content Pandora is likely to add. I think his implications speak volumes about Pandora’s future plans.

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Over the coming weeks I’ll be rolling out each individual presentation and Q&A from hivio. Stay tuned!

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