Pandora: From near-death to profitability in a year

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/25/pandora-from-near-death-to-profitability-in-a-year/

by jrwoodruff • 17 years ago

42 53 17 years ago

jrwoodruff2• 17 years ago

Glad to see these guys doing well, I've been a rabid fan since a friend turned me onto the service four(ish) years ago.

Although I don't entirely understand the last line of the article "Pandora will be a textbook case for why execution matters more than vision in tech"

I get that they've worked their asses off to make it a reality, I think the vision of smart music recommendation and discovery is what drove the execution. ??

skolor5• 17 years ago

Pandora is the only service that I regularly think "I should be paying these guys money". In fact, a while back I decided that the next time I hit the 40 hour limit I will be upgrading my account with them.

In case anyone working with/at Pandora is reading this: you guys are awesome. I've gotten more new music from you than anywhere else. I noticed you seem to have changed your algorithm lately (At least, in the past few weeks I've suddenly gotten a LOT of new music) and I like it a lot.

rgr• 17 years ago

I like Pandora a lot but a couple of months ago I switched to last.fm because it gave me more variety. Maybe it's time to check out Pandora again -- though last.fm is still 100% free.

mapleoin• 17 years ago

don't forget available outside the US

superjohan• 17 years ago

"last.fm is still 100% free."

Except in other countries than the United States, United Kingdom and Germany.

http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement

cmos• 17 years ago

I just switched to last.fm from Pandora. The last straw was the same video ad for 'Mercy hospital' every single time I changed stations.

I have to admit that listening to last.fm is a completely different experience. There are a much deeper selection of tracks and I was thrilled to hear a 24 minute DJ Shadow song.

I wish pandora the best, and I was ok with the occasional video ad. But every time I change a station? If it was every 3rd time I might have put up with it.

Estragon• 17 years ago

That's basically what happened with me, except that I didn't wait to hit the 40 hours.

manny• 17 years ago

just putting out there that pandora totally crushes deezer and last.fm when it comes to music selection for artists or songs you enter in.

blhack• 17 years ago

Perhaps I am weird but every time pandora recommends me a song and I really like it, I bookmark it. I do this so that if I end up deciding I want to buy it, I can click through to amazon from them and get them some referal money :).

It really says something about how good you are doing if people will go out of their way to make sure you get paid.

vaksel3• 17 years ago

I started out with Pandora, but then they added that 40 hour limit, seeing as how I have the radio on 24/7, I hit that the 3rd day. So I started looking for alternatives and quickly found grooveshark, they completely blow Pandora out of the water with their selection and you can actually pick the actual song you want to play right away.

Their autoplay feature is a little bit less refined than Pandoras, but I actually like that, since with Pandora I ended up listening to the same 30-40 songs over and over again, since it kept reccomending the same songs.

physcab14• 17 years ago

Thanks! I'll pass the good feedback on to the rest of our team. We're working hard to bring you more features. I'm actually working on the autoplay algorithm right now so any feedback is quite helpful. Drop me a line anytime.

Chris from Grooveshark

sarvesh• 17 years ago

I use Grooveshark and I agree that the autoplay is very naive compared to Pandora. A better autoplay algorithm will definitely help but it is hard give you feedback unless we know what you are trying to do with the new algorithm. Currently, correct me if am wrong, your algorithm for recommendation is heavily biased toward genre. It is really hard to discover new songs that I like with it and that's when I fall back to Pandora.

vaksel3• 17 years ago

For autoplay, I think the algorithm needs to give the initial song genre a little bit more weight, especially long term.

Short term it works fine, but long term(couple of days) it'll go off on a tangent. For example, I'd start out with a fast paced upbeat song, and eventually it'll go to playing non-stop slow country music.

For new discovery, I think you should let the user be able to select a new song style mid-way through. Something like "Play more like it" button, that would reset the algorhytm around the current song you are listening to.

tomjen23• 17 years ago

The problem with Groveshark is that I can't seem to find one legal piece of music on it. Other than that it is definitely better (that is easy though, Pandora doesn't work at all.

Keep up the good work.

rscott• 17 years ago

I'm a huge Pandora fan as well. For some reason one day I decided to quickly profess my love for them via email and actually got a response asking if I wanted a shirt or hat. This blew my mind, and I rock my Pandora baseball tee often as a result.

litewulf2• 17 years ago

I got a hat. I treasure that hat like it were my first born.

Its amazing how much more highly I think of them for basically just throwing out hats.

hyperbovine• 17 years ago

You have stumbled onto my all-encompassing Theory of Service: people love getting comped. No matter how cheap or silly, if it came for free people will remember you fondly for it and give you their business in the future. And they will probably blog and post on HN about it too :)

If I ever open a restaurant I am going to randomly dispense free appetizers and desserts. If I ever run a (freemium) startup, I am going to randomly give away free accounts. Not to everyone, not so much that it hurts the bottom line, but enough that the buzz and goodwill generated outweighs whatever loss I'm taking.

unalone• 17 years ago

I never used Pandora that much—I prefer consciously sitting down and listening to a particular album—but when I threw an early morning party, I set Pandora to play light jazz and the music gave everything a great feel. It's awesome that nowadays tools exist to let us manage music that way.

physcab14• 17 years ago

What's your shirt size? We'll send you a t-shirt (or a few!) if you're willing to try our service. And actually, I'll extend this offer to any HN reader/user.

Chris from Grooveshark.

steveplace• 17 years ago

dibs. I'm a large.

Huge fan of your service, great way to get a hold of obscure music fast. Haven't built out my playlists yet though

Finally tracked down a song I've been looking for since I stopped using my old creative zen player: http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Sasha_s_Voyage_Of_Ima/1...

ericwaller• 17 years ago

Hey Chris, I'm a huge fan of Grooveshark, and it's cool to see you guys on HN.

I do have one suggestion for you though: autoplay is a great feature, but it took me a long time to realize the button was even there. If there's a way to make it more prominent I think that would help.

joshhart• 17 years ago

Grooveshark's awesome! Hopefully I can come visit you guys the next time I'm back in Gainesville.

pwmanagerdied• 17 years ago

Checked it out after reading this post, and I'm damn impressed. It seems to have everything I can think of, and the quality's sweet. One question, though: I'm located in Canadian, and lots of streaming services including Pandora and others I was interested in using either didn't offer service outside of the states or stopped offering it once they hit a certain size. Is that going to be the case with your service as well? If not, I'm probably hooked.

Thanks.

PS: If you'd be willing to toss a shirt up north of the border, I'm a medium.

cmars232• 17 years ago

Grooveshark looks nice! Pandora's been recycling the same songs too much for my tastes lately, and I'm getting bored with it. I also wish I could easily access the "station logs" later.

I like the fair use policy on the copyrights page a lot.

Are you really going to be able to let users drive to the exact song they want to hear, even after critical mass builds up? Seems too good to be true. I always assumed that was how Pandora managed to keep the heat off (by not letting users pick the exact song when they want to hear it).

GavinB• 17 years ago

I signed up for Grooveshark a while back, but I've really been trying it today and I'm loving it.

Bonus points for having a song that my $15/mo subscription service doesn't!

jrwoodruff2• 17 years ago

I had a similar experience. I was working thanksgiving evening and sent them an e-mail complimenting their unique advertisements (weird, I know - I'm graphic artist though, so I really appreciate the creativity that goes into most of their ads). I got an e-mail back a few minutes later, from the cfo. I was blown away, and actually felt kinda bad for e-mailing on a holiday!

I never expected a response at all, let alone that night.

zackattack• 17 years ago

This is excellent news for Hip Hop Goblin!

Raphael• 17 years ago

Every day you're hustlin'.

Pandora: From near-death to profitability in a year

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