I wonder who is paying the artists over those 6 months? I remember the artists throwing a fit over Apple's 3 month trial.
Ah yes. The Taylor Swift debacle. Apple got their tits in quite a rosy PR ringer when it was revealed that their contract with rights holders specified ZERO royalty due on trial accounts. Days after Taylor's
purple nurple tweet, Apple amended the deal and agreed to pay the relatively standard $.002 per play on trial accounts. To paraphrase Eddie Cue,
"Oops!".
I don't know for a fact how much Pandora is paying out on trials, but I'm extremely confident that they were not foolish enough to make that sort of rookie mistake and are paying a royalty (graduated) on trial accounts.
Even if it is Rdio with better radio (which would be a very good thing), I can't see myself switching to it from Apple Music or Youtube Red (for that matter). The Siri and commercial-less YouTube are big bonuses for my typical use that are hard for another service to cancel out.
You? Switch?
heh...as ingrained and enamored as you are with Siri control & your ecosystem...I'm deeply convinced
you won't be going anywhere any time soon.
I really can't imagine there will be any substantial amount of defections from Apple Music or Spotify veterans. I’m sure there will be enough curiosity
for some using competing services—mainly the geeky—to give PP a trial run. But for the well-seasoned and practiced users, just the collection/playlist investment and UI familiarity
(however shitty) alone will prod them to stay put.
I wonder if this will get the ball rolling for Pandora profits again? They have so many users and are on so many devices that they at least have a shot to compete with Spotify for those people that aren't on Google/AM.
Indeed. Pandora’s ubiquity and long adored music chops do give them a huge advance “storming the beach”. Along with 16 years worth of battle scars in the streaming biz, they have 81 million active listeners, and 4.4 million Plus subscriber honey pot to draw from.
Also, based upon the most recent numbers, subscription streaming is just beginning to blossom. So I don't think of Pandora's Premium "survival" so much in terms of "stealing" users away from existing competitors. More that this "new" universe as a whole is expanding with room to spare.
Most certainly there are no guarantees in this space. But I think it goes without saying that Pandora has as good a shot as anyone could wish for when firing up an on-demand service at this point. Relatively it's a wee hour wet dream. It'll be an interesting 12-24 months. I wish them luck.