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Digital
Pandora doing well
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 18 December 2009
US streaming music service Pandora says it has doubled its user base in the last year, and now has 40 million people signed up. New subscribers, it says, have been coming in at 600,000 a week. It seems the Pandora mobile app has played a big part in the new boost in users, with 10 million Pandora users accessing the service via their iPhones.
Whether they are making any money I don’t know. Like Spotify the service has two models – a free to use ad-funded system, and a subscription service. Like all other streaming music services, they have struggled to negotiate workable royalty rates with the record companies and collecting societies, a fact that led them to have to block the service to anyone outside the US.
If Spotify ever does get round to launching in the US it will be interesting to see what impact it has on services like Pandora. The latter does not offer anything like the on-demand flexibility of Spotify, though arguably has the “set me up and I’ll play you music you like without you having to bother doing anything” thing better cracked than anyone else.
