Wednesday, August 20, 2008

My Pandora Story

Controversy about the possible shuttering of Pandora.com continues on the Internet. If you read the comments under any of the stories, you'll see a recurring theme -- people discover music through Pandora. Music that they buy.

I have that story, too. And it gives us some numbers to work with.

"The Love Generation" is one of the radio stations I started on Pandora. As the description says,
Sweet vocal harmonies from the Summer of Love. For a brief span of time, groups made groovy music influenced by the sunshine pop sensibilities of Southern California. Mellow songs from a gentler time.
While I started out with artists I already knew, such as the Love Generation, the Fifth Dimension, and Spanky & Our Gang, it wasn't long Pandora began adding songs and artists I'd never heard of before -- but I really liked. And, yes, I followed the links to Amazon and started buying music.

So far, I can attribute the following purchases directly to this one Pandora channel -- one of the six that I have.


Each of these discs cost about $19.00 (most were imports), so listening to Pandora for free caused me to purchase $171.00 of music directly from the labels. So let's say the average listener only buys one CD or download equivalent (although I know plenty of music geeks who've spent even more).

Pandora has approximately 6.5 million subscribers. If each one only spent $15.00 on music they discovered through Pandora, then the site would be responsible for generating $97.5 million in music sales. And a good portion of that, I suspect, went to non-Top 40 artists. After all, I wanted more music by Two of Each and Jackie Trent -- not Beyonce and Avril Lavigne. 

And if the average Pandora listener buys more than one disc? Well, then SoundExchange -- currently collecting 75% of Pandora's revenue -- really is strangling the goose that's laying golden eggs.

 - Ralph

Day 67 of the WJMA Web Watch.

2 comments:

  1. I'll post the Westergren interview on Monday morning. It's worth listening to to hear his optimism.

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  2. Cool. Send me the links!

    ReplyDelete