Pandora, one of the earliest companies to establish itself as a go-to source for streaming music, will celebrate its 10th birthday next week in style: by ditching ads.
During the 24-hour period between midnight on Sept. 9 and midnight on Sept. 10, Pandora will nix all ads and allow for a full day of streaming without interruption. The celebration, dubbed Listener Love Day, "is a thank you to each and every listener who has tuned in to Pandora over the past 10 years," the company said.
Pandora has built its business on offering users curated tracks based on their taste. If users like a song, they click a "thumbs up" symbol that tells Pandora to play similar tracks. A "thumbs down" vote means Pandora shouldn't play the song again. The model has helped users find tracks and hear more of the songs they like.
Still, Pandora finds itself in an increasingly crowded business. A slew of companies are now competing for listeners in the online-streaming space, including Rhapsody, Rdio, and others. Pandora's biggest competition, however, comes from Spotify and Apple Music, the recently launched streaming-music service from the iPhone maker.
Spotify and Apple Music have attracted millions of customers by giving them the ability to listen to streaming music without ads and with unlimited skips. Spotify's paid plan costs $10 per month. Apple plans to offer the same pricing on its own service after an initial three-month freebie program expires.
Pandora's own paid service, which is ad-free and includes more skips, costs $5 per month, but it's more akin to radio and doesn't allow for on-demand music listening like its bigger rivals. Pandora's free service is ad-supported and limits the number of track skips.
Spotify's continued growth, in tandem with Apple Music entering the market, have largely put Pandora on the back burner in the streaming business. While the company was once the face of music streaming, it's now another in a long list of companies. And it's unclear how well it will compete against Apple Music and the billions in cash that service has behind it.
Pandora is also finding it difficult to turn a profit. In the first six months of 2015, the company lost over $64 million on more than $516 million in revenue. In 2014, Pandora posted revenue of $920.8 million, up over $300 million compared to 2013. However, the company's losses widened from $27 million in 2013 to $30.4 million in 2014.
Still, Pandora has a sizable user base. The company reports that it has nearly 80 million listeners use its service each month that log over 74 billion listening hours. Music from over 200,000 artists is running on the service.
For more information visit: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2490505,00.asp
Source: pcmag.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment