Pandora Premium - On-demand music. Pandora's answer to Spotify.

@rrhoover Totally agree with your thought on paying users having settled on their music-streaming service of choice. I used to be a huge fan of Pandora as I liked being able to select a few artists/songs and have it build a relatable station that was constantly feeding me new music. However, when that novelty sort of wore off I became a paying user of Spotify and never looked back. It'll be interesting to see if this is enough to convert paying Spotify, Apple, etc. users over to Pandora.

@rrhoover @johnpaul @adammarx13 Unless they can somehow include a way to import playlists from other products (Spotify, 8Tracks). Music I think is too personal for people to keep on switching. And Spotify is cheap, and partnered with telcos for easy billing (at least here, in the Philippines) It would be interesting to see what else they're going to do after this to go after paying Spotify users.

@rrhoover @johnpaul Writing a larger piece on this (and other streaming services) right now, but here's my takeaway this moment: it won't change the landscape much at all. Here's why: 1) Pandora's on-demand offering is coming fairly late in the game; even Soundcloud beat them there (as a contingency for their label licensing deals over the last 18 months). This is especially important, considering the fact that Pandora is uniquely different than Soundcloud because of its material offering: whereas Soundcloud lived in the independent world for a while (before trying (and arguably failing) to move into major label content), Pandora has arguably always subsisted on major label content, merely distributed in a different fashion. You listen to the same Katy Perry or AC/DC songs as you would on other major label-focus services, but your engagement is through a radio dynamic. That's what made Pandora unique among the big services. Radio creates serendipity, and as much as people love curation, the drive towards "the ultimate recommended playlist" is actually what has made cracking discovery so hard for these services; they've moved away from serendipity, something so important to the delight-factor in music. 2) Unlike the other music services, Pandora's royalty rates are not negotiated per deal; they are set by an independent government organization called the Copyright Royalty Board. The pro here: they're not subject to the same types of royalty-label whims as Spotify or Soundcloud. The con here: because they are assessed based on a terrestrial radio format, they similarly have no wiggle room to negotiate better terms; they're stuck where they are. This is doubly confusing now that they have an on-demand feature. Will that part of the business be subject to the same type of terrestrial radio royalty rules, or will it be something different? The waters get muddier and harder to maneuver. 3) Pandora REALLY needs a win, which is made all the more stressful by their existence as a public company. Frankly, their numbers since they IPO'd in 2011 have been ok, but not bombastic, and since a spike in 2014, have posted pretty consistent losses. And that's on top of running around spending over half a billion dollars in 2015 (~$75M for the remnants of Rdio, and ~$450M for TickeyFly), which they now need to put to work. I broke down the numbers here when writing on Spotify's potential IPO last summer: https://medium.com/@adammarx13/s... 4) Add to all that the reality staring every major music service with major label licensing fees in the face: the rising revenue opportunities are now not coming from major label artists, but unsigned/independent ones. So while the major music services will of course continue to offer major label material, that demographic isn't even the highest earning one anymore. In effect, while music services scramble to continuously renegotiate major label terms for their life-blood (the major label material), the music landscape as a whole will move (is moving) towards a more independently focused paradigm, where, ironically, those major licensing expenditures might not be necessary. So, something to consider there. And, as Ryan and many others are pointing out, none of this even takes into account the people-factor, wherein people will likely settle on one service for their mainstream needs. Thus, for the major label content, users will likely choose between Apple, Spotify, or Pandora (maybe Soundcloud) for their premium dose of mainstream, major label material without subscribing to multiple. The way forward, then, is not in proving more of the same, but more of the different, i.e. new, independent music which is ever-expanding and flexible to distribute.

@rrhoover I agree with you that built-in integrations work great but i would go a step further and partner with other ride sharing companies likes Lyft/uber, partner with smart tvs and wearable to create more user exposure. Pandora has lost a lot of market share and they have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to converting the spotify users back to pandora. Pandora= Myspace generation Spotify= Snapchat generation for now i will enjoy my free version of spotify because i have already memorized the ads *shrugs*

@coreycrossfield @rrhoover @johnpaul While I agree that Spotify has a leg up here, the statement that they will unequivocally "win the streaming war" is overly broad and a little too bullish on one particular company. Describing how many users Spotify currently has is irrelevant in this scenario; they can have all the users in the world, but if they don't control their own destiny (which they don't content-wise), they will have continued problems whatever the growth. Frankly, their numbers suck; yes they've had amazing growth over the last few years, but they're going to start running in the same direction as SoundCloud at some point. Yes, the reported $2.2B in revenue back in November, but $1.8B of that was paid out directly to labels, which means they only kept ~$400M, which is still a nice revenue pull, but is nowhere near the $2.2B number that they touted to the tech press. But even that's neither here nor there, since my argument isn't about Spotify vs. Pandora, but that these larger streaming services in general have structural issues in their business models. Second, I don't agree that assessing a service based on the type of user they have is irrelevant. In my opinion, that's a major mistake SoundCloud made. They own the independent realm for a long while, in a way the other services couldn't touch. But then they made the decision to move into major label material, which effectively cut off their nose to spite their face. The reason this was a major error is because they miscalculated the types of users they were willing to shun for the types they wanted to capture; independently focused artists and their fans for more mainstream artists and their fans. I chronicled the fallout I saw from this here: https://medium.com/@adammarx13/s... Thirdly, to make the assumption that older listeners want a more radio dynamic and younger ones inherently want musical curation is a thought process I'm not sure I agree with. Music isn't logical, it's emotional. It doesn't fit neatly in a box, nor does it stay static. Thus, interaction with music evolves, hence the integration of radio dynamics by some of the streaming companies which were previously on-demand only. Lastly, I agree with parts of your final point, namely, that royalties are challenging and problematic. But my read on it is a little different. Frankly, royalties are the Emperor's clothes; outdated and used, as they've always been, to mollify artists who were (are) encouraged to sign label deals which had few other benefits for them. I know artists who don't even check their stream rates on Spotify because they don't make jack off it, but have otherwise made $20-30,000 profit from touring because of how dynamics have changed. The real takeaway is that music is much more fluid than it was even 3 years ago, and the ways that things are changing all benefit the independent paradigm of artists and fans. Independent doesn't need to mean small either. It simply means in control of one's own destiny and business decisions, very much unlike the major label machine. I know plenty of artists who have signed to major labels who swear they will never go back. We'll see what happens with Pandora, but Sirius has released statements in the last 2 months saying they both will and won't buy Pandora, so I don't even think we can draw a concrete conclusion on it at the moment.

@tyckr I hope they come back to Brazil too. But I think it's gonna take some time. They won't even have the web and desktop apps on launch :(

@tyckr same thing happened in Canada. Pandora is dead to me :(