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Pandora tops 60 million users

Pandora is a threat to music-intensive formats. If music is all you've got, there are digital sources that listeners will click on when you hit your commercial break... and they may not come back.
 
I listen to a lot of Pandora myself, but I don't find it dead-on every time.

I'd agree that Pandora is a threat to badly-programmed music-intensive radio. I consider it to be a direct competitor of every individual station, but one minus the local opportunities available to radio. Kasparov vs. Deep Blue.

My hope is that Pandora may spell then end not of music radio, but of cookie-cutter music radio...forcing us to innovate in order to survive. Naive perhaps.
 
I tried using Pandora last fall, while working a graveyard shift. I found its selections quite narrow and the time limit was frustrating. I know that its a free service, but it seems that it has been over-hyped, just like everything else these days.
 
MozeMan said:
My hope is that Pandora may spell then end not of music radio, but of cookie-cutter music radio...forcing us to innovate in order to survive. Naive perhaps.
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Pandora is it's own form of cookie-cutter radio that happens to fit the particular cookie the listener programs. I agree that it's probably over-hyped right now. The studies we're seeing is that while Pandora has 60 million users, they also use lots of other things, including regular radio.

The way radio is countering Pandora is with similar internet services, like last.cm or Jelli. And yes, the folks at CC know all about it, and offer their own form of Pandora on their web sites. So it won't "kill" radio, but it will further dilute it.
 
I tend to agree with 1st of 5 and The Big A. I get the so-called "Pandora fatigue" pretty easily. About the only times I listen to Pandora are when I have a craving for a particular artist, though I'm beginning to find Slacker does a better job at that than Pandora, or when I'm traveling, and that's mostly because Pandora's app is the only one that recovers seamlessly from network drops.

When it comes to Pandora being a threat to radio, I don't see it as being much of one by itself. When it comes to the "Pandora fatigue," I didn't coin that term, and I'm not the only one who suffers from it. While Pandora leads in session starts, the average session length is about 90 minutes. The only pure-play webcaster that has an average session length of greater than three hours is AccuRadio, and several terrestrial broadcasters (including CBS Radio and K-Love) have average session lengths of more than three hours. I seem to remember Clear Channel's session lengths average just a hair less than three hours on average. In other words, Pandora's session lengths are pretty anemic when compared to terrestrial.
 
Kent said:
Pandora's app is the only one that recovers seamlessly from network drops.
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Yep...one thing you can say about Pandora is they have made their product easy to use. They learned a lot from Apple.

Kent said:
In other words, Pandora's session lengths are pretty anemic when compared to terrestrial.
Click to expand...

And the funny thing is that radio takes a lot of criticism for declining TSL. But clearly the cause isn't what the critics are saying. Because it's much lower for Pandora.
 
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