The number one reason I love Pandora is that it offers an ad free paid version with higher quality. Its dead simple and does exactly what you want it to without tacked on social networking.
Pandora Files To Go Public
21–30 of 40 posts
Re: Pandora Files To Go Public
#22I don't know much about the market/strategy behind IPOs. Is it a good idea to IPO if you just lost ~$325k? I assume they have intelligent reasons behind the IPO - can someone explain the rationale?
The article states they lost $328k on revenues of $90M for the first 9 months of the year. The $328k loss is not really material (either as a proportion of revenue, or absolutely versus the size of the business) they are essentially breaking even. If you look at the numbers (image in the article) The $328k loss also includes some exceptional charges, they made an operating profit of $1.15M in the period. Their revenu…
Still seems weird seeing a company that's not even profitable yet go public. I don't expect the initial demand for their stock will be that high, despite the growth.
Re: Pandora Files To Go Public
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article states they lost $328k on revenues of $90M for the first 9 months of the year. The $328k loss is not really material (either as a proportion of revenue, or absolutely versus the size of the business) they are essentially breaking even. If you look at the numbers (image in the article) The $328k loss also includes some exceptional charges, they made an operating profit of $1.15M in the period. Their revenu…
Still seems weird seeing a company that's not even profitable yet go public. I don't expect the initial demand for their stock will be that high, despite the growth.
Plenty of companies go public before becoming profitable, it's a way to raise capital. Tesla Motors comes to mind for a recent example. Same for Clear.
Re: Pandora Files To Go Public
#24Oh, I read "files" as a noun there, as in they were going to let people see inside their database of music-quantification. Was very disappointed on learning what it actually meant...
Re: Pandora Files To Go Public
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still seems weird seeing a company that's not even profitable yet go public. I don't expect the initial demand for their stock will be that high, despite the growth.
Plenty of companies go public before becoming profitable, it's a way to raise capital. Tesla Motors comes to mind for a recent example. Same for Clear.
Exactly. The entire purpose of opening your company up to the public is so that you can raise more money than you would otherwise get privately. Yes, the shares would probably be discounted for lack of profitability, but perhaps the timing is right for them. I don't know.
Re: Pandora Files To Go Public
#26I wonder if they pay lower royalties on live music and that's why they try to jam it into my playlists all the time. In the last year or so I've felt there like there was something just a little off about it some of the song choices and I'd be curious to know if different artists/labels/genres command different rates and if that impacts the song choice.
Re: Pandora Files To Go Public
#27I can't get Pandora in Canada (unless I use a proxy), so I don't really know how it works. I was struck when I read: "About 86 percent of Pandora’s revenues ($78 million) comes from advertising, the rest ($12 million) comes from subscriptions." which made me think, wow, Pandora is kind of like a newspaper, magazine, or cable TV network!
Pandora commands higher than average ad rates. Remnant (which is bargin basement inventory) is somewhere around $5cpm and I don't think they sell to networks for display to keep demand high. It's actually hard to get inventory there unless you are a premium buyer. For those of you who don't know or care much about online ads, all this basically means is that almost every other publisher (Huffpost, whatever) would kill to Pandora's rates. The fact that they aren't incredibly profitable shows how tough the business is. God knows how Grooveshark makes any money.
Re: Pandora Files To Go Public
#28I think Pandora will go back into heavy losses if they raise money. I love Pandora as a service, but it's a far cry from being a Netflix. ( a long time paying customer of both ) Pandora's revenue is threatened by so much, RIAA contracts, pirating, advertisings race to zero ( via google ), etc... They know this, and they will need to reinvent themselves to be worth anything. As a result I predict they will blow the 10…
I hope they spend it on advertising. Their product rocks, i think they just need wider exposure. They also claim exclusive providence to being able to authentically post jobs in the bay area looking for "rock stars" to help out their company ;)
That would be a pretty bad sign. I sure as hell wouldn't invest in a company that's going to turn around and spend the money they raise on ads. They should be building a war chest and their biz dev and legal teams to get some leverage on the labels. Regular radio pays $0 of their revenue to labels, Pandora pays $.50 of every $1.
Re: Pandora Files To Go Public
#29You know something's screwed up when you can buy a company's stock, but not their product. Canadian music and copyright laws are terrible.
Re: Pandora Files To Go Public
#30I think Pandora is a good company to buy because they have superior technology. I pay the $30 or so for the annual subscription to get unlimited listening and no ads. I have tried other services like this but I always come back to Pandora. I have read several articles that talk about the techniques they use to define a "station" and I think it is pretty solid. It is my understanding that they have hired musicians to…
They actually train their people in music theory, because they pull the music apart and list a few hundred features. Depending on the genre, there are different lists of musical features that might differentiate the songs. This is what makes Pandora unique from Last.fm, or Ping, or other "social" music discovery sites. Instead of recommending songs according who likes them, it learns what kind of music you like. It l…
I don't know whether this has changed, but years ago when I worked there, the music analyst jobs required that you already know some music theory. (The training is to learn their system.) It's a good day job for musicians.