| Website | Pandora.com |
| Blog | blog.pandora.com/... |
| Category | Games, Video and Entertainment |
| Phone | (510) 451-4100 |
| Employees | 120 |
| Founded | 1/00 |
| Total | $21.3M |
| Series A, 3/00 | $1.5M |
| Series B, 1/04 Labrador Ventures Selby Venture Partners WaldenVC Peter Gotcher Robert Kavner | $7.8M |
| Series C, 10/05 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.
Pandora on VatorTV
Added: 6/1/09| Pandora |
| Pandora One |
| Pandora Radio |
| Pandora in the Home |
| Pandora on the Go |
