| Status | Privately Held |
| Website | Pandora.com |
| Blog | blog.pandora.com/... |
| Category | Web |
| Phone | (510) 451-4100 |
| Address |
360 22nd Street Suite 440 Oakland, CA, 94612 USA |
| Employees | 80 |
| Founded | 1/00 |
| Total | $20.8M |
| Series A 1 | $1M |
| Series B, 1/04 2 Labrador Ventures Selby Venture Partners WaldenVC Peter Gotcher Robert Kavner | $7.8M |
| Series C, 10/05 3 Crosslink Capital Labrador Ventures Selby Venture Partners WaldenVC | $12M |
Born out of a love for music with 99% of its employees at one time or another working as musicians, Pandora is truly a company wholly dedicated to music. With a database of more than 600 thousand songs, each digitally annotated with musical characteristics from a list of 400, the company generates personalized streaming radio for your computer, mobile phone or home entertainment system.
50 musicians carefully listen to new songs everyday noting everything about a song from its tempo to the tone of the artist’s voice. Such meticulous work makes Pandora’s recommendation engine spot on when it comes to creating a personalized radio station that sounds like your favorite artist. All stemming from Pandora’s Music Genome Project, its personalized stations are produced by grouping songs and artists that share many musical characteristics in common. This way your station is composed of similar sounding music, much of it from lesser known artists. This differs from competitors in personalized radio, such as Last.fm, which bases its stations on aggregations of its users’ listening habits. Consequently, Last.fm’s stations consist of songs that are essentially recommended by other users while Pandora’s songs are recommended by actual musicians.
Facing difficulty with the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) and the RIAA, Pandora as well as other US based internet radio companies may have their futures determined by a high raise of royalty fees for internet radio only. The fees could be substantially higher than satellite and am/fm radio, and could end internet radio for all of us. Founder, Tim Westergren, has urged all internet radio listeners to call or mail their congress people to work against an unfair hike in rates.
With $22.3 million in debt and venture financing over 3 rounds, Pandora is well funded as are most of its competitors which include MyStrands, ilike and Last.fm (Last.fm only received $5 million in venture money before it sold to CBS for $280 million). Before its third round of financing led by Crosslink Capital, Pandora gave beta accounts to Crosslink’s partners’ children who loved the service and encouraged their parents to invest.
With an ambitious step into the mobile phone world with Sprint and a possible future wifi device, Pandora acts like a company with a bright future. With any luck surrounding royalty fees, we may see Pandora in a greater capacity sometime very soon.
Pandora has around 7 million registered users and has played 4.7 billion songs. They play 94% of their catalog each day covering the very end of the long tail of music.
| Website | Pandora.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | July 13, 2007 |
| Tags | personalized-radio, social-network-music, music-recommendation |
Type in the name of an artist or song to get started with your own customizable internet radio station. Although stations start with a single artist or song, users can add additional songs and artists to tune their stations to their liking.
Avid users advocate using at least a few artists/songs for any one station to receive the best results. Click the thumbs up on a song if you like it and want to hear more similar songs, or click the thumbs down on a song you don’t want to hear again.
Additionally, through the menu, Pandora users can buy songs from Amazon.com or itunes, find album/artist information from AllMusic.com or bookmark a song/artist to go on their personal profile. Although Pandora is primarily focused on internet radio, there is a side element of social networking which allows you to connect with fans of similar music. Users can share radio stations and make comments on friends’ profiles. Make sure to visit Pandora’s founders profiles.
Pandora is offered for free with advertisements or for $3 a month without.
| Website | pandora.com/in-the-home?from_home=1 |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | July 14, 2007 |
| Tags | personalized-radio |
Pandora teamed up with Logitec and more recently with Sonos to create at home stand alone players. Logitec’s Squeezebox can stream Pandora stations to a home audio system or can simply be plugged into a set of speakers. Sonos’ player has additional internet radio as well as the capacity to play your own digital music files. Both players are fully integrated with Pandora.com on the web so all bookmarks and thumbs up/down will be saved in your computer account.
| Website | pandora.com/on-the-go?from_home=1 |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | May 22, 2007 |
| Tags | personalized-radio |
Fully integrated with your online account, Pandora on the Go allows you to access your personalized radio stations from a select number of sprint mobile phones. With rumors of a wifi device on the drawing board, Pandora plans to expand its service where traditional am/fm radio has always been.
The service costs $2.99 on top of your regular sprint mobile plan.
