Pandora
Pandora Shows That A Media Business Can Grow Around Mobile Ads
Source: https://intelligence.businessinsider.com/welcome
Pandora reported total mobile revenue growth of 92% year-over-year, according to the company’s earnings released last week.
That puts Pandora’s mobile revenue at $116 million, almost 72% of total revenue, up significantly from a 65% share last quarter.
More than ever, Pandora is a mobile-first company, and its efforts to build a media business around mobile advertising make it a bellwether for the industry.
In the recent past, Pandora seemed to be struggling to monetize mobile effectively.
The company even saw its RPM rate, the amount of revenue it could command for a thousand advertisements, decline in recent quarters.
But this past quarter it accomplished a 180-degree performance turnaround.
Pandora’s RPM rate jumped 52% compared to the same quarter last year, and 39% compared to the prior quarter.
Pandora executives have attributed the impressive mobile numbers to app improvements and bulked-up efforts to sell locally targeted ads.
Pandora has improved its ad revenue picture enough that it now feels confident lifting its 40-hour-per-month listening cap for free mobile users, despite the increased content licensing costs that will bring.
The end of the 40-hour cap could also be seen as a preemptive defensive tactic against the expected September launch of Apple’s iTunes radio streaming service.
drag2share: Facebook Figured Out A Way So Users Never Have To Leave Its Mobile App
Facebook has begun letting its Android app beta tester who’ve enabled Home to control Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora, and Rdio from a notification at the top of cover feed.
Mobile is a major part of Facebook’s user strategy, and the company is making a big push in partnering with third-party apps and services, so users never have to leave Facebook.
drag2share: Streaming Services Free Rider Problem
Paying to stream: Pandora’s free-rider problem
Not a single respondent giving a definitive answer who uses Pandora said they pay for the service’s premium version, which cuts out ads, allows for offline listening through a Desktop app, and ostensibly provides higher-quality audio.
On the flip side, among Spotify users, more said they pay for the premium version — which allows you to listen offline, on any device, and without ads — than said they stay with the free version.
And some color:
“I no longer buy music . Spotify has everything I need, and I’m just fine ‘renting’ it all for $10 per month.”
“Today, I think Spotify makes sense, but I’m too cheap to pay for it on my phone. I like iTunes Match because it’s all of my music on my phone. If I want to test something out, I use free Spotify on desktop and if I love it, I buy it.”
I stream, mostly using Spotify. I pay the $10 a month for the premium, so I can listen on the computer at work and iPad/phone at home. ”
“I’m using premium most of the time these days. I stream exclusively. You Tube is a close-second.”
Music Goes Mobile as More Smartphone Users Stream Songs – eMarketer
source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Music-Goes-Mobile-More-Smartphone-Users-Stream-Songs/1010126
Over 99% of mobile music listeners tune in on smartphones
More than one in five Americans will listen to music on their mobile phones this year, eMarketer estimates, after usage nearly doubled in 2012. Listening to music on their phones is now a regular activity for more than 70 million people in the US, and double-digit growth is expected to continue through 2015, when well over a third of all mobile phone users will participate.
Included in this figure are mobile phone users who listen to streaming music, such as via Pandora, Spotify or another digital radio station, as well as those who download music directly onto their phone, via the iTunes Store or a similar service. eMarketer’s forecast does not include listeners who only sideload music from their PC to their phone.
drag2share: My Song ‘Heaven Is A Place On Earth’ Was Played More Than 3 Million Times On Pandora And I Was Paid Less Than $40 (P)
Editor’s note: Ellen Shipley co-wrote the Belinda Carlisle hit “Heaven Is A Place On Earth.” The song topped the charts in both the US and UK in 1987. Shipley’s comments, reproduced below, originally appeared on DigitalMusicNews.com, and we are republishing it here with site editor Paul Resnikoff’s permission.
It is interesting and very disturbing that no one is addressing the SONGWRITER’s situation in this Pandora debacle.
Pandora wishes to REDUCE the amount of royalties that songwriters have already seen CUT in 2005.
An Artist Got 16 Bucks for a Song That Pandora Streamed a Million Times
Source: http://gizmodo.com/an-artist-got-16-bucks-for-a-song-that-pandora-streamed-566438837
A million of anything is pretty much always an insanely impossible number. Winning a million dollars, having a million Twitter followers, selling a million products—anything done a million times is something to be proud of. But maybe not getting your song streamed on Pandora a million times. All you get sometimes is 16 measly dollars. Or $16.89 to be exact.
David Lowery, songwriter and musician, had his song he wrote “Low” streamed 1,159,000 times on Pandora in the past quarter. That’s a pretty huge number, right? Certainly more than the 116,260 times “Low” was streamed on Spotify or the 179 times Sirius XM played the song. The difference was Spotify paid $12.05 for the 100,000 times and Sirius paid more than a dollar per play ($181.94). So how the heck did Pandora get away with just paying 16 bucks for a million plays? It’s the government’s fault.
No, seriously. Congress sets the rates of which artist royalties are paid. Lowery explains:
For you civilians webcasting rates are “compulsory” rates. They are set by the government (crazy, right?). Further since they are compulsory royalties, artists can not “opt out” of a service like Pandora even if they think Pandora doesn’t pay them enough. The majority of songwriters have their rates set by the government, too, in the form of the ASCAP and BMI rate courts–a single judge gets to decide the fate of songwriters (technically not a “compulsory” but may as well be).
Pandora is barely giving anything of worth for using the songwriters and artists’ music. The $16 Lowery got represented 40% ownership of the song as a songwriter (the other portion belongs to the band). He does note that being a performer of the song gives the artist a separate royalty but that even though it’s a bit higher, it’s also “quite lame”.
So next time you like a song, maybe support the artist by streaming somewhere else. Or buying their album. Or going to their concert. Or just giving them money when you see them on the street. [The Trichordist]
Music licensing group BMI sues Pandora, deems radio station purchase a ‘stunt’
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/14/bmi-sues-pandora/
Music licensors didn’t waste any time in characterizing Pandora’s acquisition of an FM radio station as an underhanded attempt to cheat performers out of royalties, but the rhetoric has now hit the courtroom, as Broadcast Music Inc. has filed a lawsuit against the streaming service in the New York federal system. Key to the action — which casts Pandora’s move as “an open and brazen effort to artificially drive down its license fees” — BMI asks for a blanket determination of licensing rates for all music broadcast by Pandora. According to BMI logic, the lower royalty rates that terrestrial providers enjoy shouldn’t apply to the online segment of Pandora’s business. As the flip side to that argument, however, Pandora argues that it deserves equal footing with online competitors such as Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio service, which pays the terrestrial rates. It’s a murky decision, for sure. Hopefully the judge has a good supply of Advil.
News Reading Shifts To Tablets
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/news-reading-moves-to-tablets-2013-6
Mobile Insights is a daily newsletter from BI Intelligence that collects and delivers the top mobile industry news. It is delivered first thing every morning exclusively to BI Intelligence subscribers.
News Readers Spend As Much Time on Tablets as Print (Journalism.co.uk)
Consumers in the U.S., Germany, and France are spending as much time reading news on tablets as they are reading printed newspapers, according to a new report from World Press Trends. That’s not surprising: tablets are an ideal reading device and, unlike newspapers, the news doesn’t go stale and is constantly refreshed. Overall, the report found that mobile accounts for 20% of page views in many markets. Read >
Android Owners Are Younger, Less Wealthy (Pew)
New research from Pew finds Android has a larger proportion of younger users than rival iOS. Perhaps not coincidentally, Android owners, on the whole, appear to be less wealthy. Overall, Pew found that 56% of Americans now own a smartphone. Read >
Apple To Sell Audio Ads on iRadio (Ad Age)
Just like Pandora, Apple will sell streaming ads on its forthcoming Internet radio station, straying from its core capabilities: software and hardware design. The ads will be sold through iAd, its mobile ad network, which hasn’t been a sterling success thus far.
Read >
Song Played 1.5 Million Times On Pandora Earns A Shockingly Trivial Amount Of Money (P)
Obviously, the digital revolution hasn’t been very good for the music business.
Not even apps like Spotify and Pandora are helping.
Sure, Spotify and Pandora pay musicians every time one of their songs are played – but they don’t pay much.
Take cellist Zoë Keating, for example.
In a blog post which is cited in today’s New York Times, Keating says that one of her songs was played 1.5 million times during a recent six month span?
Guess how much money she made from that…
…$1,652.74.
Shocking!
Mobile Accounts For Over 60 Percent Of Pandora’s Ad Revenues
Source: https://intelligence.businessinsider.com/welcome
Mobile continues to drive Pandora’s ad business.
Mobile ad revenues for its fiscal third quarter were $66 million, up from an estimated $53 million a quarter prior. Mobile accounted for 62 percent of total ad revenues, compared to 59 percent in the second quarter.
Overall mobile revenues, including subscriptions, increased $15 million in the quarter to $74 million.
Pandora is a prime example of how mobile is transforming what were once Web-based companies. With 77 percent of usage now coming from mobile— not to mention a majority of revenues— Pandora is essentially a mobile company.
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