A3C Hip Hop Festival Blog

From DJ'ing to Pandora: Justin Boland's Journey Through the Music Industry

Written by Cora Taft | Sep 20

Ever wonder who is in control of the music  on  your favorite Pandora station? Do you ever wonder how songs get added so fast? Well Justin Boland is the Lead Curator: Head of Hip-Hop and R&B Programming at Pandora. 

Justin Boland, also known as J.Boogie, has 25 years of experience in the music industry. He has experience in being a DJ, recording artist, curator and music director.

At Pandora, he is responsible for content and station programming, curation of different collections, and he develops Pandora’s library of Hip-Hop and related music. He does the back-end of the information like monitoring metrics to see how much Hip-Hip is being played.

Before working at Pandora, Justin worked as a Consultant/Independent contractor with Beats Music by curation songs and albums in the Electronic and EDM genres. He also worked at Pulselocker which is a music streaming and subscription service. Most importantly, he is a music producer, DJ for J Boogie’s Dubtronic Science. He has been doing this over 24 years and has performed and provided entertainment for Google, Adidas, Puma, Oracle, Sony Playstation, Levi and Ray-Ban.

Boogie has also performed at Coachella, Bonnaroo, Sundance Film Festival, and Winter Olympics 2010 and a lot of tours. From 1992-2008, he served multiple positions at KUSF. Over the 16-year span, he was a promotions director, worked on production, was an on-air personality and then became the Hip-Hop/Urban Music Director.

For three years, Justin worked as the Urban Music Director at AOL Music on Spinner.com. He created 14 channels of music and analyzed the data for usage of the stations.  He has won a number of awards for his DJ’ing skills including “San Francisco’s Best Radio & Club DJ.

Justin graduated from the University of San Francisco with a B.A in Audio, Video & Film production.

Check Justin out during A3C Festival & Conference during DJs vs. Data: Who is Making Your Playlist? On Wednesday October 5th at 3:30 PM at Room Two (Loudermilk Center).