SiriusXM is buying a 19% stake in Pandora for $480 million

[Jos]

Satellite radio company SirusXM has been in talks with executives from Pandora for the better part of a year now regarding a potential acquisition. Those plans fell through but in its place, SiriusXM has agreed to invest $480 million in Pandora, giving it a 19% stake in the streaming music company.

Pandora CEO Tim Westergren says the influx of money will give his company “the flexibility we need to attack what is becoming a larger and larger opportunity as digital music enters a new golden age."

Pandora was a pioneer in the streaming music world with its radio station based service that tailors to the user’s taste in music the more you use it. But it’s been struggling to compete in recent years with services like Spotify and Apple Music that offer on-demand streaming music. The company launched its own Pandora Premium on-demand music service back in March to better compete with them.

Pandora's active listeners were 76.7 million at the end of the first quarter of 2017, down from 79.4 million a year ago. The company makes most of its money from advertising around free listeners.

Under the terms of the deal Sirius will end up with three of nine Pandora board seats, including the chairman slot. Sirius isn’t allowed buying any more Pandora shares for another 18 months, and after than it can’t acquire more than 31.5% of the company without the approval of Pandora’s board.

In addition to the SiriusXM deal, Pandora has offloaded Ticketfly to Eventbrite for $200 million. The company had acquired the ticketing service in October 2015 for $450 million, in an effort to develop alternative revenue streams around events and ticket sales. Pandora will enter into a distribution partnership with Eventbrite as part of that deal.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/69654-siriusxm-buying-19-stake-pandora-480-million.html

 

[Brock Kane]

Well, so much for affordable streaming music! Soon SiriusXM will own over 50% of Pandora and start charging $25 a month! Good old greedy corporate world we live in!

 

[oldikes]

Ive never really understood pandora's popularity. I used it a bit a few years ago and every station I created was filled with songs that were not remotely relevant to the artist/song the station was built on. Spotify has been great - though their radio feature was also a joke the last time I tried it.

 

[Phr3d]

I've had the exact

Ive never really understood pandora's popularity. I used it a bit a few years ago and every station I created was filled with songs that were not remotely relevant to the artist/song the station was built on. Spotify has been great - though their radio feature was also a joke the last time I tried it.

I've had the exact opposite experience, been with 'em since beginning. We -have- wrecked stations choosing thumbs up on songs that weren't all time favorites, and it can be a hassle at the beginning because of that, but I have basically 6 stations that are as perfect as the genome can get - skip instead of thumbs down, etc.
A little bummed that they seem to be spiraling - 4bux a mo is all I'm willing to give for walkabout music (use to be cheaper annual)

 

[Uncle Al]

Another one bites the dust ..........