Roger Fingas
Apple Music so far isn't — and probably won't be — a meaningful threat to Pandora, the latter company's CEO told analysts during a conference call announcing better-than-expected quarterly financials.
Brian McAndrews remarked that due to Apple Music launching on June 30, there's been "no impact yet," according to Business Insider. The company lost $16.1 million overall during the June quarter, but revenue was $285.6 million, beating forecasts. Advertising grew 30 percent year-over-year.
"Going forward, we feel really good about our trajectory and competitive position," McAndrews added. "With any big launch like this [Apple Music] and the noise in the marketplace, there could be some users that experiment with it and there could be some short term impact... But we don't believe that there will be any long-term impact."
Pandora is a relatively entrenched player in the streaming music landscape. As of June it had some 79.4 million listeners, and the service is available not only for mobile devices and the Web but can often be found embedded in TVs, media set-tops, game consoles, and even many car dashboard interfaces.
Unlike Apple Music, which is a predominantly on-demand service, Pandora is strictly radio — although users can customize stations based on an artist or song, and vote on tracks as they play, content is otherwise served up algorithmically.
That could potentially allow the two services to co-exist. Apple Music does have a Pandora-like radio component, but its previous incarnation — iTunes Radio — failed to grab significant marketshare, and even its new form has been marginalized in Apple marketing next to on-demand content and Beats 1.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
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89 Comments
"Going forward, we feel really good about our trajectory and competitive position," When the **** has any company that Apple eventually crushed NOT said this?
I canceled my Pandora.. guess I don't count. lol
Al Franken (which autocorrect just changed to Frankenstein LOL) will put his fingers in his ears and go "lalalala I can't hear this over the sound of my bias." He and his lobby will go after Apple's hypothetical abuse of 800 million credit cards numbers against their competitors.
They're lucky Apple Music has major UX issues. Basically, Apple screw up.
Jim Balsillie on the iPhone in February 2007:
"It’s kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers ... But in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it."
Brian McAndrews on Apple Music in July 2015:
"Going forward, we feel really good about our trajectory and competitive position," McAndrews added. "With any big launch like this [Apple Music] and the noise in the marketplace, there could be some users that experiment with it and there could be some short term impact... But we don't believe that there will be any long-term impact."