SiriusXM Creates First Content Team for Pandora Media

[Y2kTheNewOldies]

https://news.****************/cgi-bin/rol.exe/headline_id=n36594

SiriusXM has announced people who will manage the Pandora division of SiriusXM

The Pandora team will report to SiriusXM Chief Content Officer Scott Greenstein, and includes the following:

Pandora VP of Content and Programming Alex White
Pandora VP of Label Relations Jeff Zuchowski
Pandora VP of Editorial Content Bill Crandall
Pandora's Head of Podcasts and Entertainment Content Partnerships Lindsay Bowen

 

[Ai4i]

We want Lee Abrams back!
We want Lee Abrams back!
We want Lee Abrams back!
We want Lee Abrams back!

 

[Y2kTheNewOldies]

https://radioinsight.com/headlines/175894/siriusxm-pandora-launch-pandora-now/

Pandora Now has been launced

 

[TheBigA]

Lots of people in charge of content, but all of the content is created by record labels.

It may be "new and improved," but Pandora is still a music distribution service.

 

[CTListener]

We want Lee Abrams back!
We want Lee Abrams back!
We want Lee Abrams back!
We want Lee Abrams back!

I always found it interesting that Abrams took freeform radio and made it into a salable format that got ratings and made money, but when he was hired by XM and put in charge of music programming for a company trying to make people pay for radio, he took most of his channels, including the ones playing mainstream hits, in the opposite direction and played a bunch of out-of-left-field songs. Ultimately, Sirius, with its tight approach (and Howard Stern) was catching up rapidly in subscribers. The takeover ("Merger") was no surprise.

Lee tried the same thing with a newspaper in Chicago. That was a pure and simple disaster.

 

[TheBigA]

Lee tried the same thing with a newspaper in Chicago. That was a pure and simple disaster.

Agreed. Randy Michaels suffered from the same disease when he returned to radio.

 

[DXingRadio]

So a branded 20on20? A tiny bit of old XM returns haha!

 

[CTListener]

So a branded 20on20? A tiny bit of old XM returns haha!

I remember that gimmick. Listeners were urged to vote for their favorite songs (from a small pool of singles) as often as possible and the channel's playlist would be adjusted every hour to reflect the voting. I never believed the voting truly determined what got played more on such a granular level for a second. At least Pandora legitimately collects data from its users and can at least have the channel reflect what's hot among those listeners at the current time.

 

[Ai4i]

I cannot find the half-hour video of Abrams explaining how he placed each of the music channels into one of four categories:
1. Comfortable & Analogue (decades, most country)
2. Comfortable & Digital (modern rock, hiphop)
3. Eclectic & Analog (Fine Tuning, classical)
4. Eclectic & Digital (Music Lab, Beyond Jazz)

Xmfan.com used to have it easilly accessible but I don't know where it is now.