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Pandora Posts Second Quarter Results

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GRAMMYs
Dec 2, 2014 - 3:22 pm

Pandora Posts Second Quarter Results
Internet radio service Pandora has posted second-quarter financial gains with revenues of $67 million, a 117 percent year-over-year increase. Advertising revenue totaled $58.3 million, a 118 percent increase, and subscription and other revenues reached $8.7 million, a 112 percent increase compared to last year. Total listening hours reached a record 1.8 billion, a 125 percent year-over-year increase, with Pandora accounting for 3.6 percent of total U.S. radio listening, up from 1.8 percent last year. Despite the growing numbers, Pandora posted an overall $3.2 million loss for the quarter. (8/26)

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Pandora's New Podcast Genome Project Wants To Help You Find Your New Favorite Shows

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The music streaming company's latest offering has launched and is ready to suck you into its engine to discover what podcasts you like and keep you listening
Philip Merrill
GRAMMYs
Nov 13, 2018 - 2:40 pm

On Nov. 13 the Pandora Podcast Genome Project launched, expecting to do for podcasts what the iconic Music Genome Project did in the early days of streaming music recommendation. To this day their high-quality music recommendations distinguish their brand, so now they are going after the 83 percent of Americans who do not listen to at least one podcast each week. They're coming for you.

Pandora claims its podcast recommendations benefit from the ease of labeling a podcast's content, offering more categories for analysis and comparison than most music. More people listening to podcasts is likely to mean more people listening to music podcasts in particular, but it's unknown how well music content will fare if there is a surge in listening. Regardless, Pandora proposes to be the agent who finds what you will be most interested in for yourself.

"With the introduction of podcasts, listeners can now easily enjoy all of their audio interests — music, comedy, news, sports or politics — on Pandora, the streaming service that knows their individual listening habits the best," said Pandora Chief Product Officer Chris Phillips. "The Podcast Genome Project's unique episode-level understanding of content knows exactly what podcast you'll want to discover next, and will serve it up through a seamless in-product experience that is uniquely personalized to each listener and will continue to grow with their tastes over time."

Initial podcast publishers in partnership with Pandora on the project include The New York Times, NPR and Slate.  Phillips explains that, similar to their Music Genome Project, the new podcast suggestions are built from a combination of both human and machine scanning to find the details they see as most important to keep your ears happy.

"We use humans for the quality and machines for the scaling. An example would be picking up on a new topic that is starting to be discussed in podcasts," explains Phillips. "On Questlove Supreme [a Pandora original podcast], when Questlove was interviewing Jermaine Dupri, deep into the conversation they started discussing Atlanta politics...It's a needle in a haystack. So, we would analyze those types of discussion, and our curation team might be scanning those if they're showing up inside a podcast, and they'll create a new tag that then goes out and looks across all the podcasts we have, and that might become a new search term."

As reported by Billboard, Pandora will be releasing the Podcast Genome Project to 1 percent of users today, and those not selected can sign up to request early access here. Once a Pandora user has access to the new offering, a podcast section will appear alongside their music in the app and offer suggestions for new shows you may want to try.

Podcasts Provide Labels New Way To Grow Streaming Revenue

DJ Mustard performs at Pandora summer festival, 2017

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Pandora's $80 Million Q3 Earnings Tops App Chart

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The Q3 ranking marks the service's first return to the No. 1 slot since 2015
Brian Haack
GRAMMYs
Nov 3, 2017 - 1:54 pm

Pandora's $80 million Q3 revenues for 2017 made it the top-grossing revenue earner for a nongame app, as reported by TechCrunch.

This past April, the streaming service fully launched its new Pandora Premium subscription tier, aimed at competing directly with Apple Music and Spotify — which is thought to be the key driver that helped the service hopscotch its rivals and top the app chart.

According to the data, compiled yearly by SensorTower, Pandora's new premium service helped grow revenues by more than 142 percent year-over-year, amid an industrywide combined revenue growth of 67 percent YOY for all nongaming apps. By comparison, overall YOY growth for Q2 2017 was 57 percent, indicating there's likely still a large amount of market headroom remaining before in-app subscription revenue, and that rate of growth could continue to accelerate into and through Q4.

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Pandora Goes Curated With Streaming Playlists On-Demand

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Still backed by the sophisticated Music Genome Project, Pandora adds new dimensions of data with "wickedly expert curators"
Philip Merrill
GRAMMYs
Oct 30, 2017 - 4:17 pm

Today's announcement that Pandora Premium launched 250 curated playlists turned heads, in part because their streaming service developed without listeners being able to request specific tunes the way people can on Spotify. When Apple Music launched in 2015 it placed a big emphasis on its hip human curators while Pandora seemed to have staked out the machine-driven side of music recommendations.

Pandora's algorithmic back end depends on the Music Genome Project — a way to turn one track's musical properties into a set of several hundred descriptive pieces of data. Based on the analytics of each user's personal preferences, Pandora generates radio-like streaming stations to fit each individual listener. This is still true and has resulted in modern peculiarities like when one spouse prefers their hip new music from Spotify while the other spouse favors country music from Pandora. Although Pandora has led the way, all the major streaming services now hope their personalization-math will make visitors want to return and encourage subscribers to pay.

The copyright-license fees for on-demand selections are higher than for pre-programmed streams, and this is likely why Pandora's featured playlists are only available on its $9.99-monthly Premium tier. It is also related to Spotify's challenges with its business model, because these higher costs make it harder to be profitable. Pandora is leveraging the new work put in by its "wickedly expert curators" to add new stations for its Free and $4.99-monthly Plus tiers. In terms of math, this is going to get interesting because Pandora's personalization analytics will be getting new data from users' interactions with its human curators' work.

In terms of language, Pandora's featured playlists really speak Millennial, and that's fun. So we have new playlists with names like "Heartbreak Reggae," "The TRL Era," and "Flexxx." The wit passes down to free stations with edgy labels like "Keep It Lit," "Hipster Brunch," and "Beast Mode." It can seem fragmented, trying to have something for everybody, but streaming services must grab attention to survive — then learning each individual's preferences narrows down what gets recommended most prominently. So score one for humans. Even math-master Pandora has come around to giving human curators leading roles in answering today's epic question, "What should I stream next?"

Pandora Challenges College Students For Social Impact

Common

Common

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Pandora Challenges College Students For Social Impact

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Partnering with Real Industry, the Pandora Challenge is holding star-powered events at five universities to leverage music data for good causes
Philip Merrill
GRAMMYs
Oct 9, 2017 - 12:07 pm

GRAMMY winners Jack Antonoff and Common, along with BloodPop and Manchester Orchestra are participating with five universities in Pandora Challenge: Music & Social Impact events, held in conjunction with Real Industry.

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The hands-on workshops provide students with access to data from Pandora's Artist Marketing Platform and Next Big Sound and coaches them through outreach and communication strategies to make a difference for important good causes.

Common will be at New York University's workshop on Oct. 11. On Oct. 21 Antonoff's workshop will be held at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell to promote The Ally Coalition for LGBT equality. Other workshops in the series included BloodPop's Oct. 4 event at University of Southern California and Manchester Orchestra on Oct. 9 at Middle Tennessee State University.

The Oct. 9 event promotes the 1 Million 4 Anna Foundation's work on behalf of Ewing sarcoma cancer sufferers. "It's about being a part of something that is bigger than you can even comprehend … helping people," said Manchester Orchestra lead guitarist Andy Hull.

A fifth workshop is scheduled for Nov. 19 at the Stanford University Innovation Fellows Conference.

"The energy and love of music the students possess is an incredibly powerful combination," said head of Next Big Sound Alex White. "With help from our partners at Real Industry, we're not only harnessing that combination for a good cause but also giving students experience and knowledge they can use to jumpstart their careers in the music industry."

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