Inc. Magazine has a solid overview of Tim Westergren's struggle to keep the Pandora music service alive as a viable business:

Tim Westergren is due to take the stage in an hour, yet he seems half asleep. His shoulders are rolled forward, his hair floppy and unbrushed, and he's wearing loose blue jeans and scuffed hiking boots. He ambles around the auditorium he's rented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art while the staff of Pandora, the online radio company he founded, buzzes around him. The salespeople smile at the advertisers, the biz-dev folks pump the arms of partners, the engineers form a nervous little knot. Meanwhile, the crowd gathering outside the auditorium doors keeps getting larger.

Pandora has been around in one form or another since 1999 and has spent most of its existence on the brink of shutting down. Yet Westergren has always found a way to rescue his company and infuse it with new hope, new direction. Tonight is one more of those times: Pandora's biggest product launch since its debut. The company is announcing a move into mobile products, which will let listeners access their personalized radio stations over Sprint (NYSE:S) phones or Sonos and Slim Devices in-home music players.

Finally, at 6:45, the doors open and Westergren, 41, snaps to life. Most companies have customers. Pandora has fans.

Who should care if Pandora lives or dies? For one, all the future Aimee Manns running around out there:

Westergren started composing scores for low-budget independent films, and that's when he began thinking differently about music. He'd ask directors about the sounds they were searching for and listen as otherwise articulate, creative people struggled to find the right words, usually falling back on descriptions like "something like Natalie Merchant, but more scary." Sitting at his piano, trying to evoke a frightening Natalie Merchant, Westergren thought about what terms such as "scarier" and "darker" and "happier" meant in purely musical terms. Would changing the rhythm, the melody, or the alto sax arrangement produce the desired result? If so, then wouldn't it be possible to create a giant database of music based on its underlying characteristics, which would make it easier for listeners to find exactly what they were looking for?

Around the same time, he read an article about the plight of singer-songwriter Aimee Mann. Though Mann's two previous records had sold a respectable 227,000 copies and won critical acclaim, her record label was refusing to release her current effort; it was focusing instead on blockbuster artists with sales in the millions. For Westergren, Mann's story brought back bitter feelings about Yellowwood Junction, which had built a strong following in the western United States but had no way to get its music out to larger audiences. "All the ideas that had been swimming in my head coalesced at that point," he says.

The article has more of a focus on the nuts-and-bolts business side of Pandora than other stuff I've read. (It is in "Inc.," after all.) And there's details on the PR blitz Tim's been engaged with ever since the Copyright Royalty Board institute a rate hike on Internet radio. Here's some of that PR now -- a messy but fun interview I and my occasional partner-in-crime Adam Conner did with Tim on how Congress should respond to the new royalty rates.

Bonus: Your Scola guide to the Music Genome Project, the clever technology behind Pandora.