Meet the Folks That Keep Pandora Humming

Meet the Folks That Keep Pandora Humming:
The Technical Operations staff at Pandora loves the Holiday season; the popularity of seasonal music means that December is one of our busiest months of the year. Now that everyone else is getting back to their normal lives, the Ops team is catching their breath and taking a moment to look back at some of the fun milestones from the end of 2012.

Pandora serves hundreds of millions of songs to millions of listeners – hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of music – every day. When you tally things up the numbers get so big, so fast that it becomes hard to wrap your head around. We decided to look for some creative ways to express the scale:

On Christmas Eve, you guys listened to more than 5692 years of music collectively – at the peak it was over 41 days of music being played every second!

If everyone tuned in to Pandora at that exact minute and wanted to sit down for a concert, they would fill more than 55 Oakland Coliseums – more than the combined population of Washington D.C., Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota and Alaska. If we tried to make it a music festival, it would be like combining all three days of Coachella – sixteen times.

If you recorded all of that music on cassette tape it would stretch to the moon and back more than 5 and a half times.

The Most played holiday song was a short song at barely over 2 minutes long, but collectively you spent 7 years 21 days and 39 minutes listening to it on Christmas Eve. Any guesses on what song it was?

Christmas Day is just as exciting with all those new digital toys. If everyone who signed up for a Pandora account that day wanted to take a trip, they would need to charter more than a thousand Boeing 747 airplanes.

It was quite a year for us here at Pandora and we're excited to really dive into 2013; building the servers, software and networks to make sure that the music you love is always playing. Here are some fun factoids about the people that work very hard every day to bring you all the music discovery and delight on Pandora:

Myra Chachkin
Senior System Administrator

1. Years at Pandora: 6 years
2. Favorite music discovery on Pandora: Sexteto Mayor — fantastic Argentinian tango
3. What's playing on Pandora now: King Tubby — old-school dub reggae
4. Geeky hobby: Indonesian Gamelan

Chris Cook

Lead System Administrator

1. Years at Pandora: 4 years
2. Favorite music discovery on Pandora: Perfume Tree, I'm a sucker for trance-y female vocals
3. What's playing on Pandora now: I keep coming back to my Grow Up And Blow Away station and my "Shrieking Bunny" station seeded with Echo and the Bunnymen and Shriekback
4. Geeky hobby: Hacker Scouts!

Raju Kadam

System Administrator

1. Years at Pandora: 6 months
2. Favorite music discovery on Pandora: Yoga Radio
3. What's playing on Pandora now: Asha Bhosle (Bollywood music)
4. Geeky hobby: setting up the office Replicator 2

James Kelty

Director of Network Engineering

1. Years at Pandora: 6 years
2. Favorite music discovery on Pandora: Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian
3. What's playing on Pandora now: Dandy Warhols
4. Geeky hobby: living in Portland

John Litell

Senior System Administrator

1. Years at Pandora: 6 months
2. Favorite music discovery on Pandora: Ockham's Razor, Seattle's turbo-Celtic Rock band
3. What's playing on Pandora now: My "Celtic Punk & Friends" playlist, made with seeds from the likes of Oysterband, The Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly and The Pogues
4. Geeky Hobby: Scandinavian Folk Fiddle

Aaron Porter

Director of System Administration

1. Years at Pandora: 5½ years
2. Favorite music discovery on Pandora: Robert Wyatt
3. What's playing on Pandora now: R.E.M., Cracker & Ned's Atomic Dustbin
4. Geeky hobby: brewing, baking & chocolate making

DIGITAL JUICE