SiriusXM buys Pandora for $3.5 billion(theverge.com) |
SiriusXM buys Pandora for $3.5 billion(theverge.com) |
Saddly this is almost all self inflicted.
While Spotify, Apple music and Google music really worked hard to get people to actually pay for the service Pandora continued to act like it was a VC backed company in hyper growth mode long after that was the case.
They fought with the record labels longer than most of their competitors did to their own determent and they didn't end up getting any concessions for their extra effort.
And when everyone else was letting you select any music you wanted in playlist, they insisted on staying radio style only.
They also got 3.5 billion for a company that hasn't made any money in its 18 year existence so it's hard to feel too bad.
This is really the nail in the coffin. After a couple days on a Spotify trial, I converted to a paid Spotify account. The only reason I logged onto Pandora after converting was to get the list of my favorited songs to add to my playlist on Spotify.
I would thumbs down live versions or comedy skits, then it would skew the entire system.
This was years ago.
Years ago I spent a week recreating my long lost high school and college CD collections on Google Play was able to find almost everything, even some of the most ecsoteric remixes.
And when entertaining, people always gravitate towards DJing through YouTube videos on the TV, and so I wired everything up with Chromecast / Chromebook pairs to make it easy. Even though they can go to any app/site they want, everyone uses YouTube.
The customer service experience was harrowing, featured slow response times, an indifferent attitude to my issues and a wholly inadequate resolution leading me to quit the service.
Every so often I would see news coverage about them struggling and all I could think was, "guess things on the customer service side haven't changed."
I think Sirus only makes money off the folks who forget to cancel after the promotional period. It’s like $20 a month and I’ve forgot to do it my self for a couple months.
Pandora always had the best selections on their radio channels. Spotify is not as good for random radio selections. I would never pay for Pandora after having so much music available on Spotify or Apple Music.
These days I mainly use http://www.gnoosic.com for recommendations and then look for the artists on the web, Youtube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud etc.
Not sure if that makes me one of a kind?
This approach gives me more of a "discoverer" feeling then using one monolithic service that spoon feeds me my musical life.
For me, an algorithmic feed of music just isn’t interesting. Music is art, and art is for humans, not computers.
What worse was it was bit off from type of song I asked for, and particularly I couldn't stand to listen to. I switched back to Google Play Music, which has a mix of my own uploads and (smaller for things in my taste, but doesn't complain I can't skip) music from the service.
I'm not sure if this was a win for the team or a mercy killing. But, if someone can explain what's in this for customers, that would be very helpful.
[1] http://investor.siriusxm.com/investor-overview/press-release...
They don't really expand my horizons and play the same crap over and over.
My favorite is chirpradio dot org. Real DJs who are real music buffs.
I've noticed that YouTube (just plain YouTube, not the new YouTube Music) is actually decent at recommending music though. I played some songs by The Meters and Herbie Hancock, and through its recommendations I learned about the existence of Lafayette Afro Rock Band and learned that Prince made a funk/fusion album in 1977 before his pop stuff. I wonder if it's just using its regular video recommendation algorithm and not anything music specific, which might be a different approach than the music services.
EDIT: And by really strange coincidence, I just checked out Chirp, and the last song they played was by The Meters, and before that they played another band (Cymande) that YouTube recommended in the same session.
I am still pissed off about the lengths I had to go to in order to stop receiving communications from them. They refused to remove my contact information from their system and could not promise I wouldn't be contacted again in the future. I had to ultimately change all of my contact information to false information, fortunately the guy I was talking to was sympathetic to my plight and had no objections testing out the system to see what BS info it would take.
The whole escapade landed them on my short list of companies I will never do business with ever again.
Things I want in an OEM receiver: 1) Carplay/Android Auto, 2) Software updates for 1, 3) Radio, 4) To never do anything else (call me, install bloatware apps, reorder menus, etc).
Unfortunately, though not a subscriber, my car stereo often defaults to the Sirius input when I start it. This mean I'm greeted with Sirius ads when I start my car. Usually, this ad literally consists of playing a really annoying buzzing/screeching sound, followed by someone explaining that if you subscribe, you won't have to listen to that sound. That's an .. interesting .. strategy.
And they automatically rotate and update based on your listening!
they don't really have an ongoing per-customer costs, right?
so long as they extract the all the money you're willing to pay them, be it $20 or $90, that's fine. i expect they worry more about total customer count.
There is also the cost of having a call center contact deal with the renewal every 6 months. 20 min on the phone costs at least a couple bucks.
The webapp was unusable and Howard Stern is now boring to me.
I went with a Pandora-ish/Spotify-ish service named Slacker Radio, which costs only $2.50/mo pro-rated, has a 320k bit-rate and is commercial free.
SiriusXM may need Pandora to survive in the future. Pandora/SiriusXM can be re-worked to compete with Spotify.
Second sentence of the article
>The satellite radio company says it intends to maintain the Pandora service and brand, along with its roughly 70 million monthly active users (5.6 million of which are paying members)
So this purchase is about Sirius re-entering the market. I think they'll pivot pandora to be more self-serve and they'll merge the good things people liked about sirius (comedy, shock jocks) with the good things people liked about pandora (choice, freemium)
I'll answer my myself: For my car(s). SiriusXM just ... works. No pairing, no bluetooth on/off dance, no cables, no unpairing my wife's phone, no setting my car radio's source, Internet connection or not ... it just works. The only other time I listen to "satellite" radio is in my office, streaming from my Chromebook - which is just silly but don't judge me.
Loading music and podcasts is possible, but takes work and never feels like you're "connected" to the live world. You're always a few days behind the rest of the world, even though it's some of the best content.
Also, effectively XM was the winning company - its the XM platform that continues on, and the XM billing platform as well - its more like XM bough sirius.
If you travel in places without good data, XM is invaluable to have.
Anyone who is away from a good data connection for a significant amount of time. E.g. long haul truckers, rural areas (especially in the western US), mountainous regions. If most of your car time is commuting in the city/suburbs, that may not be an issue.
Its current business model may be at risk as car companies start to get more smartphone integrations. But with the money and content they have, they are uniquely positioned to selectively buy out streaming competitors to diversify their income streams.
There is risk if they can successfully integrate Pandora with their existing business, of course.
TBH the sound quality is too bad for even casual music listening unless I'm really desperate.
My wife listens to her LA stations, I listen mainly to news and talk radio.
When we drive cross country it works regardless of cell reception.
I dont listen to music at all.
Well, you're stuck with the car by the time this kicks in...
And, apparently, the OnStar experience has just recently (<12 months) gotten quite horrific--apparently it used to be an online thing but that wasn't intrusive enough. I made the salesman sit with me while I was signing up (Okay, you want your commission from this, you get to spend your time.). Verbally. Over a shitty, high-latency, low bandwidth voice connection.
The salesman sat there visibly appalled. The salesmen got his manager. The manager got somebody else. etc. By the time I was done, I had 7 different people from the dealership listening with shock on their faces.
Big manager: "Ummm, yeah, this is a problem. We are strongly encouraging our customers sign up for something that makes them angry. That's ... not good."
Apparently, nobody at the dealership had experienced a signup in the last 12 months.
And thumbs down is always way too harsh in any algorithm you'll find, because there's no way of telling the algorithm why you didn't like it. If I thumbs down Thunder by Imagine Dragons, how does it know I really do like Imagine Dragons and that album was good and the genre was good, I just don't like that one song? And if I thumbs down Good Riddance by Green Day how does the algorithm know I love Green Day and I like that style of music, but I just have a really negative emotional attachment to that song and I don't want to cry right now?
Context is super hard but super important. I listen to a lot of ambient music at work and now my Apple Music and Spotify suggestions are all ambient music, even though I don't listen to that genre for pleasure.
And without decent playlists and music discovery, why would you pay a monthly subscription instead of once-off fees for music you like?
From a contingency planning perspective, even if their business is healthy now, they might also want to hedge against a long-term decrease in private car ownership. We're seeing quite a few trends that point in that direction: increasing use of ride share services, self-driving cars, wealthier folks moving back into the cities, increasing cultural interest in moving away from motorized transportation as the default, more remote work.
My personal threshold for usability is that I need functionality while wearing thick winter mittens.
For more power users it's trivial to setup a Tasker/Llama/Automate rule to launch your preferred music app when paired to a particular Bluetooth device.
This is nice, but is it $21.99-a-month nice? It's $300 a year, that's the problem. That's twice as expensive as Apple music and Netflix. That's the cost of a data-only cellphone plan.
There are so many places to get news that I'm actually surprised to hear that sirius is an important place for you to get yours.
Do you know a lot of "smart" people who would trade a guaranteed $80M/year for possibly more doing podcasts ?
1) They have lots of customers. I work in the music industry and have insight into how much money Pandora brings in. They might not be _profitable_ but there's definitely a lot of cash flowing there, meaning profitability isn't out of the question.
2) Technology and fit with existing business - SiriusXM has lots of curated and exclusive content. With a Spotify-like platform in Pandora, they can get some of that content infront of more streamers and diversify Pandora. The only streaming service with Howard Stern, and the only one that you can stream directly to your car over Sattelite without using data? That's compelling for a lot of people.
Of course, licensing rates means that the company only gets to see a few hundred million of that, and a significant portion of that needs to go to advertising sales personnel -- audio advertising is incredibly hands-on compared to other forms of internet advertising.
As an aside: it was interesting when the stock cratered last year to the point where the market cap of the company was lower than its annual revenue -- all the revenue in the world doesn't make up for negative margins.
Yup, revenue doesn’t really mean anything; Walmart’s market cap is less than their 2017 revenue.
My gut feeling is that this will be one of countless such acquisitions that‘ll turn out to be bad for both users and the acquiring company in the next couple of years. There‘s a reason why Pandora isn’t profitable in a market where others make 100‘s of millions in profit every year.
Plus or minus any assets that can be made liquid/sold for cash which haven't been depreciated totally or can be still used by the new company.
Strategic considerations also factor in customer/user base, current relationships with buyers/suppliers, technical know-how and market share which can boost or decrease the valuation.
Liabilities and the general riskiness of the transaction/merger such as debt can also factor in, so a financially healthy company is worth more.
After all that, it will depend on negotiating power/how much SirusXM wants Pandora and if there are also other potential buyers bidding for the company. If say Apple Music started bidding for Pandora, SiriusXM and Apple Music could keep one-upping each other so that the price increases.
You can google things like Enterprise Value, Discounted Cash Flows, etc. but they're a bit advanced and based on the principles I've mentioned.
they can also integrate the tech to be more competitive, or they can shut the service (currently a competitor) down and hope to pick up a portion of those listeners
<silence>
bugs me is that
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drive under a tree or overpass. Seriously, having
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really bugs me.
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LTE
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Does that too
Spotify can also download large quantities of music and playlists...so with minimal planing you will have no buffering issues.
I don't have sirius built into my car, I think this is an american car thing (did sirius pay them buckets of money for this integration? methinks so). If I wanted it, I'd have to have a ugly receiver taped somewhere on my dash.