Jeff Z

by Fred Deane

When Jeff Z joined Pandora seven years ago, it wasn’t without a depth of terrestrial radio experience. Factor in his extensive label relationships and you have an ideal prospect to open new doors for the streaming service.

Jeff started his radio career in 1993 at Z100 in New York, had a short stint at The Box Music Network, and then was part of the WKTU launch in 1996 where he spent eleven years. In 2007, he traded coasts and landed at KZZO in Sacramento. He returned to NYC in short order time and joined French based company Goom Radio with Tim “Romeo” Herbster.

In 2012, Jeff started working at Pandora, first in a consultant capacity (for 7 months), and then scored a permanent position helping the company build label relations. In Jeff’s words, “I started working more closely with (co-Founder) Tim Westergren and started having him engage more with label, artist and manager interaction. We eventually developed an area called the Music Makers Group.” Jeff’s mission over those early years was “focused on how Pandora could become more of a relationship-oriented company with the labels, artist and management communities.”

In February of this year, SiriusXM took leadership control of Pandora and Jeff Z was able to fully apply the leverage of his horizontal relationships across the music industry spectrum in advancing his agenda priorities he was working on throughout most of the decade.

Now that Pandora has been part of the SiriusXM family since February, how do you define your current core responsibilities?
The transition has been so much fun for me. As a former radio person, I was excited to be able to work with some of the greatest radio stations in America. Learning the dynamic of each station, the opportunities these stations have available to artists and how to best combine the efforts of Pandora and SiriusXM to maximize content for our listeners has been the most important task so far.

You initially joined Pandora in 2012, how did the opportunity present itself to you at the time?
A person I worked with at WKTU was on the sales team at Pandora. We were having dinner and he was telling me about the number of listeners that Pandora had on a monthly basis. I was blown away to hear that one service was playing an artist so many times to such a huge audience and the music industry didn’t seem to know or care at the time. An opportunity was staring me in the face and I wasn’t going to miss it!

What was your original role and where did it lead you inside the company in the early stages of your tenure?
I was initially hired as a consultant. The curiosity around why the music industry had no interest in working with Pandora when at the time they had over 50 million unique users per month was something that Tim Westergren was curious about as well. I initially came in working for a team in the sales marketing organization but quickly started to work with Tim and get him to interact with the music community. This led to eventually creating an industry relations team.

Several SiriusXM managers have been there for quite some time, many of whom had come from your ex-world of radio. How was it when you first arrived at their headquarters, and who are you sharing most of your time with?
It was great to walk down the hall on day one and see the faces of Kid Kelly, Geronimo, Bryan Pino and Jeff Regan. I had the pleasure of working with all of them at some point while in radio and I’m a fan of the work they do and have been doing for a long time at SiriusXM.
My job has me working closely with Steve Blatter and his programmers to help build out content strategies that benefit SiriusXM and Pandora listeners. Finding that 1+1 = 3 that only SiriusXM and Pandora can bring to an artist is the key to this being one of the most powerful combination platforms in the country.

At Pandora you were under the marketing arm, with the new structure at SiriusXM you’re under the content wing. How have responsibilities changed in your current situation?
While at Pandora, Before the marketing arm we were a team called the Music Makers Group that reported into strategy. The job of my team has always been to bring unique opportunities to our listeners to make us their audio destination. That hasn’t changed in the seven plus years I’ve been at Pandora and is the same goal now at SiriusXM/Pandora.
At certain times under certain leadership it has been easier but we have never had the opportunities that are now in front of us after the acquisition. We also now report into a leader (CEO) Scott Greenstein that is all about content and winning by all means necessary. Nothing is off the board so we are constantly being challenged to think outside of the box and bring unique content ideas to the table. It’s f-ing exciting!

How much interaction do you have with the label community and what departments are you dealing with at the labels?
I’m going to say “we” a bunch because my team is who really keeps the momentum moving forward. My team is made up of an incredible force of talent that came from promotions, marketing, digital, management, agency, live event, A&R, editorial, and TV. Because of that, we work across many different departments within management teams, labels and agencies. Having a team with such a diverse background assures me that we will never be unable to find the right person to talk to about each specific opportunity.
We are in the process of realigning the team to be more effective by partnering with other members of the SiriusXM family that speak to the industry. Ideally, we will create one front door to the label community and be dealing with the department within the label and management teams that can get the job done.

How has your previous experience in radio supported your current efforts with the label and management communities?
At most of the major labels the leadership has a promotions background. Being able to use my past relationships has helped me to educate the leadership at labels and management on what Pandora can do to help their artists. This is an ongoing process and definitely hasn’t been simple. With some of the new product and programming opportunities we are now able to partner with an artist and they are seeing the value from day-one. Combine that with the efforts across SiriusXM and you have a force that both the label and management communities know can break their records.

How competitive do you feel about terrestrial radio, a medium that surely perceives all DSP’s as big competitors these days?
I’m a very competitive person. Winning to me is becoming the most listened to music service and the only music icon on the home screen of your phone. Terrestrial radio has held the ring of most listened to for many years due to ease of use and I truly believe that is coming to an end. The younger generations have everything they need right in the palm of their hands. The phone has become the hub for all activity and it’s all about the simplicity of getting what you want quickly. We are all fighting to become the app of choice and most of the time, that decision is being made by the person in the house that doesn’t even have a driver’s license yet.

What is the biggest challenge confronting terrestrial radio these days?
The biggest challenge is attracting the younger listener that has access to an unlimited amount of content in hundreds of different ways. They aren’t looking for that radio personality to tell them what to listen to, they have social influencers all over the place. They don’t need to wait to hear their favorite song, they can say it out loud and a device will play it on demand. Times HAVE changed and the fight to acquire these users is expensive. The fight is what I remember being my favorite part about radio but this time it’s not against someone else down the dial…it’s against financially successful monsters!