Being a business noob, I've got to ask - How exactly does a company that makes nothing in 18 years, get acquired for 3.5 billion?
users, and their generated data along with the potential to monetize whatever service they are consuming, is the new "revenue" they can also integrate the tech to be more competitive, or they can shut the service (currently a competitor) down and hope to pick up a portion of those listeners
Pandora brought in $1.4 billion in revenue in 2017. Actual revenue is also revenue.
Whenever there is an exit like this I like to remember that for just 4B, Sirius could have had a Star Wars franchise instead. These valuations are nutty.
Cancelling Sirus is always interesteing. I always say I don’t want to pay the $90 or however much for 6 months of access. No $50 is also too high. How about $30? Ok sure I’ll pay. I think Sirus only makes money off the folks who forget to cancel after the promotional period. It’s like $20 a month and I’ve forgot to do it my self for a couple months. Pandora always had the best selections on their radio channels. Spot…
Bought a car with free SiriusXM subscription. I listened to a few stations a number of times - pretty good selection, but really didn't use it much. After the trial period, started getting calls from them. I (regretfully) accepted a discounted rate to extend my trial, but I had refused to accept any subscription that auto-renews. (Only later would I find out the salesperson outright lied to me that they were offering me a one-time subscription). The extended period eventually expired, and they billed me for another subscription at a higher rate. Since I never ultimately listened to anything, I never realized it was still active. By the time that one expired, that particular card had been closed, and they started mailing me past due notices. Which is when I discovered they'd continued billing me. I was irate and called their customer service at least a dozen times, every time getting a different runaround. On most of those calls, the runaround was to transfer me to a menu system that went nowhere. I fired off a letter to them, then just gave up, refusing to pay. The past due notices eventually ended up at a collection agency, and I had a couple interactions with them until I discovered the magic word "fraud". I sent the collector a letter explaining how Sirius had charged me for something I never asked for, which is fraud. It literally took years, but finally I got Sirius off my back. I am definitely uninstalling the several instances of Pandora we have.
Audible has a similar ridiculous thing going on. At any point you can cancel your $15 a month subscription and they will ask if you want to pay $7 instead. Anyone with this knowledge can easily get the service for $7 forever. Or you can start infinite trials and get infinite free books.
Can you explain I more detail how I can get cheaper audible?
Go through the cancellation flow on the website. You’ll be offered a coupon before the final step.
I think this is really exciting actually. I LOVE SiriusXM because their radio is curated by an actual DJ. You get to hear so many tracks that algorithmic services like Spotify never would surface. I use both Spotify and SiriusXM as for me they fulfill very different use cases. Spotify is for playing what I want to hear and Sirius is for when I want a human with deep expertise in a genre to play things for me. For me,…
I totally agree with this. Algorithms still have a ways to go to keep up with a human DJ. As far a human DJ who has the ability to pick the songs he wants and not just a formulated top 40 playlist chosen for him.
It's such a shame that Pandora didn't do anything with rdio.com. Rdio was the best music service I've ever used. Not only was the music high quality, but the UI was very intuitive on all devices, and it also had cool features like if you're playing Rdio on your laptop, you could use your phone as a remote control.
It's built into my new car's stereo system, and it's as quick and easy to use as an FM radio. Using my smartphone and various services takes more effort.
Smartphones are getting increasingly well-integrated into the car's stereo, though - especially in the Appleverse. From a contingency planning perspective, even if their business is healthy now, they might also want to hedge against a long-term decrease in private car ownership. We're seeing quite a few trends that point in that direction: increasing use of ride share services, self-driving cars, wealthier folks movi…
> Smartphones are getting increasingly well-integrated into the car's stereo, though - especially in the Appleverse.
My personal threshold for usability is that I need functionality while wearing thick winter mittens.
Poor Pandora and their investors. This is for about a quarter of what they were worth just 4 years ago. Saddly this is almost all self inflicted. While Spotify, Apple music and Google music really worked hard to get people to actually pay for the service Pandora continued to act like it was a VC backed company in hyper growth mode long after that was the case. They fought with the record labels longer than most of th…
> And when everyone else was letting you select any music you wanted in playlist, they insisted on staying radio style only. This is really the nail in the coffin. After a couple days on a Spotify trial, I converted to a paid Spotify account. The only reason I logged onto Pandora after converting was to get the list of my favorited songs to add to my playlist on Spotify.
I haven't used Pandora in years and Spotify almost never. I use SoundCloud sparsely, on occasion when someone posts an indie or to listen to podcasts like a16z. But for everyday use, I use Google Music or YouTube / Music.
Years ago I spent a week recreating my long lost high school and college CD collections on Google Play was able to find almost everything, even some of the most ecsoteric remixes.
And when entertaining, people always gravitate towards DJing through YouTube videos on the TV, and so I wired everything up with Chromecast / Chromebook pairs to make it easy. Even though they can go to any app/site they want, everyone uses YouTube.