|Policy
Late last year, with a handful of existing brand clients, Pandora started testing a product called Video Plus, which rewards viewers with song replays and the ability to skip tunes in exchange for their ad views.
While shorter ads have been all the rage on digital platforms recently, that narrative appears to be a little more nuanced with Pandora.
After unveiling a three-tiered business model in December to compete in music streaming, Pandora is now incorporating parts of its subscription-based Pandora Premium service into advertising units.
Pandora Premium is now available for anyone to try. Like just about every other streaming music service, it’ll run you $9.99 per month and the app is available for Android and iOS (a web version of Pandora’s on-demand service is coming soon).
Streaming services accounted for 51 percent of total U.S. music revenue in 2016 — about $3.9 billion — from a mix of paid subscription services (Spotify Premium, Apple Music), ad-supported services (free Spotify, YouTube), and internet radio (Pandora).
Now the app has a new trick: Its brand-new on-demand music subscription tier, built to rival Spotify and Apple Music, is layered seamlessly on top of its famous people-and-data-powered playlisting engine. Pandora Premium is here.
As the lights of the strip glimmer below, Pandora co-founder/CEO Tim Westergren stands before two dozen advertising executives in a 61st floor suite in the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. It’s the first day of 2017’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and he’s pitching Pandora’s new direction.
It’s been a trend for some time, but now it’s official: Americans consume more music through on-demand streaming than digital album and track sales from services like iTunes.
Healthy lifestyle fans, Pandora is watching what YOU listen to for your workouts and now that it’s officially the beginning of the year and resolutions are in full swing, they took a look at the most popular work out stations on Pandora and the top spinning artists and songs on each.
Beyoncé made history with her album Lemonade, which was streamed a record 115 million times in its first week. Just one week later, Drake broke that record when his album Views was streamed 245 million times. The age of streaming music has arrived in full force, displacing both physical sales (e.g., CDs) and downloaded songs (e.g., iTunes).