Interview w/ Kevin Seal - Pandora

Kevin Seal is the executive producer at Pandora and has been working with the Music Genome Project for the last 6 years. He lived in Bloomington for a while, where he played in Java and collaborated on the Bloomington Underground Music Sampler cassette series. Take a second to read about his adventures in the music industry (including playing in a band with the Dessner brothers of the National):

How and when did you start playing music? (age, instruments, etc..)

I begged my parents for a toy piano when I was 3, and then started piano lessons at 5. I still have that little Jaymar toy piano, and use it to pick out melodies at home. My grandma, Esther Buchanan, was a honky-tonk piano player in her youth, and she helped teach me how to read and write music notation.

Our public school had a great music program, so I was really lucky in that regard. I was a pretty restless kid, so the band director let me switch instruments a lot. I went from clarinet to oboe to alto sax to bari sax to pit instruments in marching band -- marimba, xylophone and all that -- to bassoon. My tone was never all that good, but I enjoyed getting my hands on all of those different woodwinds. But piano was always my main instrument, and I played that and the Fender Rhodes in the jazz band. There was a phenomenal jazz pianist in town, Frank Vincent, and he was my mentor from about eighth grade on.

I sang a lot, too, and had been writing and demo'ing songs on a little Fostex 4-track. When I was 15, I recorded this super-lo-fi sci-fi rock opera about genetic engineering called 'Power.' Really pretentious shit, but, you know, I was listening to a lot of Yes and other prog rock. I also played drums in this kinda Dead Milkmen-y band with my friends Eric and Tom and Spencer -- Spencer went on to start the Burning Star Core project in college, and he picked up the violin as an adult.


Can you give us a brief personal music history?

Senior year of high school, I joined this band that Bryan Devendorf and the Dessner twins had been working on called Equinox. They all went to different schools, and were way more social creatures than I was -- they drank beer, and I was a total goody-goody up until then --so we played house parties that their friends threw. We did the Musicfest day at my high school, and later a battle of the bands at Bogart's in Clifton, where we were up against a ton of metal bands. Equinox sounded a bit like Traffic. Sorta jammy, and the product of listening to a lot of Phish and classic rock radio on WEBN. We recorded an album that summer of '93, a few months before I moved to Bloomington.

Sorry, you wanted this to be brief...

In Bloomington, I was in the band Java (listen on MFT here) for four years, which was a great time. I feel like those were the first real gigs I did, with Java at the Second Story and the Old Saloon. I also had a few short-lived other bands. Phatso, which is what Matt Wilson and Cupcake played in before they started Homunculus, and Chive, which recorded an album at Farm Fresh and played Culture Shock.

After getting to California, I recorded an album with a horn sextet that had a bunch of thick vocal harmonies, but it never came out: the Sextet Horn Sextet. Someday, hopefully, it'll see the light of day. I also toured across the US with the band Colonel Knowledge, which played Second Story in the summer of 2001 -- that was the last show I played in Indiana.

I started working with Griddle around the same time as Colonel Knowledge, and it's been Griddle ever since. Ten years running now, with the same four guys. That's where my musical heart is. I wish Griddle could tour more, but... you know how it is. I'm married now, with a baby on the way. My days of sleeping in vans are probably behind me. But I can't believe Griddle has never played in the midwest at all. Bums me out. Hopefully we can play a few shows in Indiana when Album Number Four comes out this summer.


Being one of the few people we know who is making a living in the music business (at Pandora) can you discuss how you fell into this position?

Well, I came at it sideways, really. I studied journalism and music at IU, thinking that journalism would pay my bills while I put all of my passion into music. I sort of assumed I couldn't make much money doing music, since being in a band was such a feast-or-famine thing. Gigs just didn't pay well in the midwest. I knew all of these amazing musicians, and nobody could support themselves playing at bars. I left Indiana to go to grad school at Berkeley, thinking I was going to head into music journalism.

This was 1999 when I left j-school, and journalism jobs were already getting gutted. The Internet wreaked havoc on newsrooms before it really hit the music business.

So the whole "day job to pay for instruments and studio rent" thing was out the window. I wrote for music websites -- Musicspork, Tinymixtapes, and a few smaller ones -- and freelanced for Wired magazine, but music journalism barely paid anything.

I found it easier, in the Bay Area at least, to make money by playing music than by writing about music. I'm glad I had a fallback position, but what I had always heard growing up -- you can't support yourself playing music -- wasn't really the case. My Griddle bandmates and I started a soundtrack-production company called Tunesmith Worldwide, and we looked for work doing soundtracks for online cartoons, jingles, video games, that sort of thing. We funded Griddle albums that way, since we were running our own label.

It's just a different climate in northern California that it was in Indiana. The dot-com wave brought a lot of jobs, and there are tons of people starting projects and seeking venture capital. Productions were getting made, and if you had a broad set of skills -- could edit video, write copy, do HTML -- then you could piece together a living.

One of the editors I was writing for wanted me to interview Travis Morrison for his first SF solo show after the Dismemberment Plan broke up, and at that show, I met a drummer named Jeff who told me his day job involved listening to music all day and answering questions. This sounded great, of course. I asked Jeff if I could apply for a job, and he gave me his boss's number. I ended up taking this listening test. Choose one of four songs, listen through, and explain what was going on in the harmonic structure. I chose "I Missed Again" by Phil Collins. It has a tricky little modulation up a half-step in the bridge, if I remember correctly, and I wrote about all that. It was the harmonic dictation from college in Bloomington that helped me get
the job as a full-time music analyst in late 2004.

That's back when it was Savage Beast. We were working on the Music Genome Project, answering hundreds of questions about each song. It wasn't until a year later that the company changed its name to Pandora and started using this musical research to power personalized radio playlists.


What is your job description at Pandora?

I'm Executive Producer, so I head up writing and production for all of the original content on the site. I'd been a music analyst for a few years, but then Tim -- the founder of the Music Genome Project -- had an idea to start an audio podcast about musical traits. Since I had experience writing radio scripts and editing dialogue audio, my podcast sounded pretty good, and Tim asked me to head up the whole series. One thing led to another, and advertisers started demanding video, so the Pandora folks promoted me to head that up too.


What is the future of the music industry in your opinion?

Well, we're all building that together, aren't we? It's the hippie in me saying this, sure, but the future of this industry is what we make of it. We -- all of us together, these individuals -- are the music industry now. Personal responsibility is key. If you want your local scene to thrive, go out to shows. Go out to shows a LOT. Buy local. Pay cover charges. Research the bands in your town, and support the ones who are doing something good.

The optimism of Pandora is based on the idea that we're trying to help build a middle class for musicians. We're trying to subvert that feast-or-famine situation that has plagued music ever since LPs started getting distributed. It shouldn't be the case that the top 1% of the musical world gets the overwhelming majority of ticket sales and paid downloads. That's the legacy of broadcast rather than narrowcast. We all grew up paying attention to Casey Kasem and the American Top 40 rather than, say, the Indianapolis Top 40.

What I'm hoping is that the regional circuits start building up again. It just doesn't make financial sense any more to tour nationally all the time. Even the bands that you think are doing well are barely covering their gasoline costs. Not to mention that it's horrible for the environment, and wasteful. But starting in concentric circles, and touring in your region, playing the small towns as much as the big cities... playing more all-ages shows, hitting even the smallest colleges. There's a lot of potential there.

So, as much as music access is global now, and some kid in New Zealand may find you online -- which is hugely inspiring -- I think the industry should focus on local scenes more than the national. Think of the flood of information out there. I can barely keep up with Pitchfork, and I read it every morning. But if I could filter Pitchfork to just show me bands within 100 miles of my doorstep, it would be much more useful.

As for my own band, we're not making CDs at all anymore. We'll print shirts, and we'll do short-run vinyl as soon as we're able to save up some money, but if people want digital files, we'll just get them download codes.


Are there any other music sites and services that you really like or feel are doing something really special?

I use a free, open-source music notation system called Noteflight. Notating parts and getting real flesh-and-blood musicians to play those charts is huge in my world. A friend told me the other day that someone has built stave notation for HTML 5, but I haven't played with it yet. It's all in JavaScript, apparently.

Soundcloud interests me a lot. Sharing assets for remixes -- that's only going to get bigger. I love remixing other bands, and having them do the same for us. There's a great DJ named Kyron who released a full CD of Griddle remixes he did, and it blew my mind. Anyway, Soundcloud is a great resource for that.

I love Bandcamp. Such an elegant way to present music, and I love that they won't even LET bands upload MP3s. I'm in favor of them forcing our hands into presenting higher-quality digital files. Bandcamp is a company that is really acting like a leader. Respect for the album art, respect for lyrical presentation, high quality streams, and a very clean interface. I'm always happy when a band we're playing with gives me a Bandcamp link.

You may laugh at this, but I still think MySpace has the potential to be revolutionary. The sheer power of numbers there makes a lot of interesting plays possible for them. If MySpace would let me make localized stations, or, say, stations based on all the acts playing at a certain local venue in the next two months... I would use it to get into more of my neighbors' bands. Again, I'm all about the localization.

And the more we're all using our iPhones and Droids and Blackberries for everything, the more that tie between local venues and the listening experience becomes huge. What if venues themselves streamed the recordings of the acts booked on their calendar? I'd listen to that.

While we're onto venues, I think venues could make way more money if they had happy hour shows as WELL as night-time shows. That's also me getting old, but when I work until 5:30 and then a weeknight show doesn't start until 9... I don't get it.

Oh, and I'm going to miss Lala. I'd been using Lala a lot to preview albums before buying.


Have any favorite Indiana-related bands or records? (past or present)

I'm a huge fan of the Sardina album, Presents. I reviewed that record for the IDS (Indiana Daily Student), and couldn't stop listening to it. I still think it's an under-appreciated masterpiece. That's my favorite album to ever come out of Indiana.

I also love everything Dave Fischoff has ever put out. I don't know why his last album, the Crawl, got slept on, but it did. He's a real sculptor, though, with such an eye for detail. If Bruce Bickford made records rather than claymation, he might do something like Dave. He's in Brooklyn now, doing remixes under the DJ name "Spoolwork," but he did his first record when he was still living in Indiana.

Those Panoply Academy records are great. I like a lot that Secretly Canadian puts out, but those rhythmically bizarre, oddly satirical, disturbing Panoply records are closer to my aesthetic than most of their more delicate songwriting-driven records.

Rapider Than Horsepower has some of that cracked sensibility to it. They're Indiana, right?

As far as older bands go... the Dancing Cigarettes. I think "School of Secret Music" should be required listening for any new music student arriving in Bloomington. So fucked up and squirrelly, but so deeply musical.

I played the Ffudd cassette, "Birth of the Fool," a lot. They had that Dancing Cigarettes spirit too, in a way, where it was super-brainy music school guys putting their theory smarts to use making twisted rock music. You should get Ffudd on MFT! Some of those guys ended up playing on Kim Fox's album, Moon Hut.

Oh, and Homunculus were great. That was a major-label band with a major-label aesthetic, which I think a lot of indie rockers didn't really get at the time. But "Words" is full of top-notch songwriting. I wish they were still together.

My favorite band to play with when I was in Bloomington was Sway Kiss. Nick Quagliara is a talented guy.

I wish I knew newer Indiana bands, but sadly I don't. I gravitate to whatever local scene I'm in, so I listen to a lot of Oakland and San Francisco music these days. I need to hear the PJ Christie solo stuff, since I'm such a Sardina fan. Who else should I check out?


Listen to Griddle here!