Pandora
Performs
Pandora Performs captured the company’s essence like no other event or program. Period.
When I began leading this event in 2015, it was a small-scale event at a venue down the street from our office. The local Oakland team members loved the event—and we kept some version of it via “jam sessions” — but it was a very HQ-centric event and we were now a bigger company with offices all over. I saw the potential in the event to be something truly special and connective for the whole company.
The event grew to be a multi-city battle-of-the-bands style competition, with many employees forming new groups just for the sake of this event. The first elimination round was based on employee votes, so these groups would create demos and run epic internal campaigns to win over their colleague’s votes. A panel of judges from across teams, locations, and levels, would select the final lineup, and those groups would be flown in from across the country to perform at an iconic Bay Area Stage, including the Great American Music Hall, the Fillmore, and the UC Theater.
Even our founder, Tim Westergren, made an appearance on stage—performing alongside all of the employees.
This was Pandora’s culture.
Jump to video recap of Pandora Performs at the Fillmore
Pandora Performs was inspired by punk zines of the early 90s, which also paid homage to the city of Pandora’s HQ - Oakland - where many now-famous punk bands were born.
Each band / artist name was given a specially designed graphic to be displayed during their performance (playing here), and we extended this look and feel to a social media series that featured some of our performers (below).
Artist Vignettes
We creates a series of artist vignettes to showcase different employees, teams, and offices at Pandora. Cut-downs of these videos were used across social, and the longer form videos were woven across the career site on both department pages and location pages. These spotlights also served as great recognition tools for team members—ultimately leading to increased company pride and retention (the Pandora Performs cohort saw higher retention rates year over year—and those who had left would often come back to perform with former colleagues!).