When Tim Westergren, the founder of the Internet radio service Pandora, asked a packed Stamps Auditorium on Friday afternoon, “how many people here have used Pandora?” all the hands in the room went up.

The Pandora phenomenon has been sweeping the nation since it launched in 2005. The free website allows users to discover new music based on the artists they already like.

Westergren said that through Pandora — as an established radio service with about 600,000 songs in its collection — he aims to reinvent radio and help lesser-known artists gain the publicity they deserve.

Westergren, who was brought in by the campus entrepreneurship group MPowered, said he aspires to change today’s radio, which "is very limited in the music it plays," and transform it to "something that’s much more satisfying and personalized.”

Seventy percent of Pandora’s music library belongs to artists without a record label, Westergren said. He explained that as long as the quality of the recording meets Pandora’s standards, any music is entered into the database.

He said that he hopes to “turn Pandora into a massive promotional channel for tens of thousands of otherwise invisible working musicians.”

In 2007, when Pandora's existence was threatened by sky high performance fees, Westergren solicited the help of the website's millions of users. Westergren said he sent an e-mail to subscribed users asking them to write to Congress. He said the overwhelming response kept Pandora in business.

“Washington received 400,000 faxes in three days and eventually about 2 million calls, faxes, and letters to Congress,” he said.

In the near future, Pandora plans on going global so that music lovers and musicians all over the world can enjoy the benefits of Pandora radio, Westergren said.

After studying political science at Stanford University, Westergren’s idea for Pandora was born from his experience as a struggling musician, he said.

As he played in bands and hung around fellow musicians, Westergren said he noticed a discouraging problem.

“What I saw was a tremendous number of very talented musicians who nobody knew about,” he said.

After reading an article about a semi-well-known artist whose record company refused to release another one of her CD’s, Westergren decided to create a solution that would expose lesser-known artists to the ears of the world.

“I kind of put this thing all together and thought, 'well there’s a genome thing,' ” he said. “ 'Maybe if I can marry that to technology, some kind of algorithm, I could deliver (the artist’s music) to the Web as a recommendation tool.' ”

After sharing the idea with a friend, renting office space, hiring engineers and finding investors, Westergren’s Music Genome Project was put into action.

Yet the road to success for Pandora was far from smooth. Westergren said that in mid-2001, after the investors’ money ran out and some of the technology collapsed, employees' paychecks shrank until they were non-existent.

He said that for three years, about 50 people worked without pay.

“We were really in a pretty deep dark hole,” Westergren said. “I had 11 maxed-out credit cards and I owed I think a couple hundred thousand dollars to friends and family.”

Now with 25 million registered U.S. listeners — a number that grows by 50,000 people each day — Pandora has finally reached the level of success that Westergren knew it could.

The event was part of MPowered’s Entreprelliance conference this weekend that brings together students involved in entrepreneurship from colleges across the nation to discuss, share and collaborate on entrepreneurial ideas.

Michelle Cheng, an Engineering senior and the president of MPowered, said that to most students the word “entrepreneurship” is very intimidating. She said her group aims to make it less frightening.

She said that having Tim Westergren as a speaker enabled MPowered to bring students with varied interests together to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an engineer or business major to pursue entrepreneurship.

“Pandora is used by students on campus at Michigan from every major,” Cheng said, “and we really invited Tim because we thought he would connect with so many students, share his story and what he’s learned.”