Does pandora radio make money

From the start, Rdio had more product sense than business sense, and its cautious approach to growth and marketing would ultimately spell its doom. For a solid year, though, using Rdio felt like the future. Securing label deals took so long that the app was in development for two years before it launched, and it showed in the polished product delivered by its team. There were its innovative social features, showing you what your friends were streaming in real time, and a "heavy rotation" playlist that highlighted albums based on how many friends had listened to them.

That was the whole idea.

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Rdio is seeking bankruptcy protection and plans to wind down its service. Pandora is acquiring its intellectual property and some of its employees.

Music Streaming Service Comparison: Amazon, Apple, Pandora, Slacker Radio, Spotify | International Business Times

In interviews with current and former employees, a picture emerges of a company that developed an excellent product but faltered when it came to marketing and distributing it. Early as it was to the United States, Rdio was born in the shadow of Spotify, a cunning and well-financed competitor that excelled at generating buzz — and using that buzz to acquire paid subscribers.

As streaming music became a playground for giants, Rdio turned to a terrestrial radio company in a last-ditch effort to grow the user base. Rdio first bubbled up to my attention in ; after a three-month trial, I gladly subscribed.

For a decade I had amassed a large collection of mp3s, backing up my old favorites and tending to their metadata as if iTunes were a zen garden. But when Rdio arrived, it got me to explore. I listened to more new music than I ever had before — and more old music, too. In the former case: EMA, the War on Drugs, Frank Ocean, Miguel.

Faces, A Tribe Called Quest, and a dozen REM albums I had never gotten around to listening to.

All of this before Spotify arrived in the United States. From the start, though, Rdio was in trouble. Even in latewhen it began to spread among design-savvy early adopters in San Francisco, people were already talking about the coming launch of Spotify. By contrast, Rdio required a paid subscription.

Becherer, who worked at Apple at the time, recalled the excitement around Spotify. Rdio eventually developed a free tier, but it came long after Spotify launched in the United States. More pressingly, the company struggled to make the case for its own unique service. Rdio never had a dedicated marketing chief for more than a few months at a time. But many people inside the company blamed the lack of in-house marketers on its lack of traction.

Later, Mark Ruxin, who joined Rdio after it acquired his app Tastemaker, served in the role. But he only served in it for a few months before leaving. Looking back, some former employees say Rdio sometimes focused on the wrong things. It invested many product cycles in refining its queue — a place to collect things you want to listen to later. I still wish we could have solved it, but it was more of a personal quest than a brutally honest assessment of does pandora radio make money. BySpotify had rocketed to 24 million users, 6 million of whom paid.

Struggling to stand out, Rdio turned to Cumulus Media, which operated terrestrial radio stations. Cumulus took a large equity stake in the company; in return, its sales force began selling ads for Rdio, which enabled the company to finally offer the free, ad-supported version of the service that Spotify stock market headed for another crash been offering in various forms since Sg alpha forex also promised to promote Rdio on its popular stations.

But the resulting signups were apparently nothing to brag about — Rdio never disclosed how many paid subscribers it had. In hindsight, this appears to be the point at which Rdio began to unravel.

In Junejust before the Cumulus deal was announced, Rdio CEO Drew Larner announced he was stepping down. Former employees say Larner was never totally comfortable being CEO; his expertise was in dealmaking, and he thought the company needed a leader whose talents lay in product and user growth. Larner declined to comment. Malthe Sigurdsson, its head of product and the person who oversaw its innovative design efforts, quit a month after Larner. In November, Rdio laid off a third of its staff.

Why Rdio died - The Verge

Nse derivatives market while development on the core product continued, it increasingly felt radio-focused.

In August it added live radio stations to the app, a move designed to capitalize on the success of iHeartRadio, an app developed by the company formerly known as Clear Channel. For Rdio, it turned out to be another dead end. The economics of streaming music are brutal. Record labels have does pandora radio make money all the leverage, and take most of the gross revenue from streaming services.

Rdio realized this only belatedly. Which is partly the trap of the business model itself — because of the content licensing deals, the margins for the business were so incredibly thin. You have to make it up with extreme volume, which is why you see Spotify going after every human being in the world. It remains to be seen whether Apple or Google can turn their own streaming offerings into viable businesses — or whether they will simply use music as a loss leader to draw consumers further into their respective ecosystems, making the money back on hardware sales or other services.

Ultimately, it is not a game Rdio was ever built to win. The people who made it focused to a fault on making something beautiful, something that celebrated the music they love. Sigurdsson "wanted to build a music service that was social at its core but was also beautiful," Becherer says. Miner jokes the design was aimed at "snobby album purists. It is expected to launch in late Ever since the layoffs two years ago, Rdio users have been waiting for the end.

In recent months more and more bugs have surfaced in the app, and music has gotten slower to load. It squatted on the phone like a sick old dog, waiting to be put down. It was just a matter of time.

Some folks are pointing out that the original on-demand music streaming music service was in fact Rhapsody, which first licensed music from the major music labels in I should have mentioned Rhapsody in this piece. Log In or Sign Up Log In Sign Up.

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