{"id":112929,"date":"2021-07-27T19:30:45","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T18:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/?p=112929"},"modified":"2021-07-27T19:42:48","modified_gmt":"2021-07-27T18:42:48","slug":"two-years-ago-pandora-was-bought-by-siriusxm-for-3-5bn-its-since-lost-over-10m-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/two-years-ago-pandora-was-bought-by-siriusxm-for-3-5bn-its-since-lost-over-10m-users\/","title":{"rendered":"Two years ago, Pandora was bought for $3.5bn. It’s since lost over 10m users."},"content":{"rendered":"

It was one of the music industry’s biggest stories of 2019: In February that year, satellite radio giant SiriusXM announced it had completed the acquisition of Pandora in a $3.5 billion all-stock transaction.<\/a><\/p>\n

At the time, Pandora remained a predominantly free, non-interactive music streaming service, but had launched two nascent subscription tiers: the $4.99-per-month Pandora Plus, and the $9.99-per-month Pandora Premium.<\/p>\n

The latter was once billed by Pandora as a Spotify killer. (Pandora’s ex-CEO, Tim Westergren, even boasted that Pandora’s $9.99-per-month platform would be the music streaming market’s first “true premium product.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

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Yet two years on from the moment Sirius committed a multi-billion dollar sum to buying Pandora, the US-only music service’s user base continues to shrink rapidly.<\/p>\n

According to SiriusXM’s just-released Q2 2021 results<\/a>, some 55.1 million monthly active users (MAUs) were engaging with Pandora in the three months to end of June this year.<\/p>\n

Continuing a long-running decline in Pandora’s MAUs, that 55.1m figure was down by nearly a third (-32%) on Pandora’s all-time MAU peak<\/a> of 81.5m in Q4 2014.<\/p>\n

It’s also down by nearly 11 million on the platform’s MAU count (66.04m) at the close of Q1 2019, shortly after Sirius acquired Pandora.<\/p>\n

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How swift has Pandora’s user reduction been? Pandora’s own website still suggests<\/a> that it offers a “highly-personalized listening experience to approximately 70 million users each month”.<\/p>\n

That was true three years ago. Now it’s a full 15 million out.<\/p>\n

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\"SiriusXM<\/figure>

Not that any of this has hurt SiriusXM’s own prosperity.<\/p>\n

For one thing, despite that ongoing shrinkage in users, Pandora’s total advertising revenues actually climbed 82% year-on-year in Q2 2021 (following the Covid-hit turbulence of 2020) with $383 million generated in the quarter.<\/p>\n

That $383m revenue figure included off-platform results such as Pandora’s AdsWizz business, and was also up on Pandora’s pre<\/em>-pandemic performance: the platform generated $306 million from ads in Q2 2019.<\/p>\n

“Including Pandora, total revenue at SiriusXM in Q2 2021 stood at $2.16 billion, up 15% on the $1.88 billion generated in Q2 2020.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another set of numbers worth keeping an eye on: Pandora’s “self-pay” (i.e. not bundled into car purchases) subscriptions business.<\/p>\n

In Q2 2021, the net number of Pandora self-pay subscribers crept up by 118,000 across Pandora Plus and Pandora Premium.<\/p>\n

The platform ended the quarter with 6.51 million self-pay subs, versus 6.25 million in the equivalent quarter of 2020.<\/p>\n

Pandora’s total revenues \u2013 across advertising and subscription \u2013 in Q2 2021 stood at $516 million.<\/p>\n

That was up on the $336 million generated by Pandora in Q2 2020, and the $441 million generated by the platform in Q2 2019.<\/p>\n

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Including Pandora, total revenue at SiriusXM in Q2 2021 stood at $2.16 billion, up 15% on the $1.88 billion generated in Q2 2020.<\/p>\n

The SiriusXM platform itself generated $1.64 billion in Q2 2021, up on $1.54 billion in the equivalent period of last year.<\/p>\n

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Another standout metric for Pandora is its total ad supported listener hours in each quarter.<\/p>\n

In Q2 2021 \u2013 as just announced in Sirius’s latest financial results \u2013 Pandora attracted 3.03 billion ad-supported listener hours.<\/p>\n

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That was down on 3.29 billion in the prior year quarter, down from 3.49 billion in Q2 2019, and down from 3.86 billion in Q2 2018.<\/p>\n

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Pandora isn’t the only music-specific streaming service that SiriusXM takes an interest in these days, of course.<\/p>\n

In February 2020, SiriusXM made a $75 million minority equity<\/a> investment into SoundCloud.<\/p>\n

In 2018, Pandora became the exclusive ad sales<\/a> representative for SoundCloud in the United States.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, SoundCloud signed up to sell advertising in 14 European territories<\/a> through SiriusXM’s AdsWizz.<\/p>\n

Pandora acquired global ad sales platform AdsWizz in a deal worth $145 million<\/a> in May 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But SiriusXM’s overall revenues grow handsomely year-on-year anyway<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":44221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112929\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}