
Pandora Is Said to Have Held Talks About Selling Itself - guiseroom
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/business/dealbook/pandora-is-said-to-have-held-talks-about-selling-itself.html
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rubidium
I pay for Pandora b/c I get to listen to radio without ads and talk show
hosts. I don't want to worry about what songs to play. Select a station and
go.

"Pandora to post $1.2 billion in revenue for the year, an increase of 27
percent from 2014, the company’s slowest annual growth ever." ... It's cases
like this where I wish it wasn't a public company and instead was run by
someone who wanted to keep making the best music streaming app/website in
town.

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buckbova
I paid for pandora for a period. But now it wants to play the same songs all
the time.

Moved to spotify. I can listen to an available playlist or to every album from
an artist one at a time or make my own playlist and store it for offline use.
Seems more natural and wide open.

I had (and still do in the vehicle) XM radio, which basically solves your use
case. Radio with no adverts. Some stations do have hosts, but it's not a talk
show.

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cmsmith
1\. New company comes in with VC funding

2\. Uses funding to operate at a loss and undercut and outperform existing
players

3\. Growth slows because there are only a couple billion internet users out
there. Raises prices or decreases value to try to find a profit.

4\. See step 1

It's hard to see this as an efficient method for finding the best product in a
free market.

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smaili
Repeat 1-4 enough times and you have yourself a bubble.

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tenpoundhammer
It would be great if Netflix bought pandora, I can see Netflix doing really
great things with the underlying tech and expanding on the general idea and
service of pandora. Also the pandora recommendation engine could be leveraged
to provide improved Netflix recommendations.

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ma2rten
Pandora's algorithm is specific to music and it requires musicians to hand
label each song.

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airza
I don't think they continued doing this. It seems like they bootstrapped this
way, but last time I used it (a few years ago) it was recommending the same
artist 's work in two vastly different styles.

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gzavitz
The genome is still in use, and many professional musicians are happily
employed as curators for it.

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archagon
It would be so depressing if Pandora's incredible music trait database went
down the acquisition drain. I would pay good money for a service that let me
search for songs by sets of traits. ("Give me some songs in minor, with
technically impressive solos, with haunting female vocals, without any
drums.")

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nik736
Can't we just get Rdio back? Please. :-(

~~~
KingMob
It's a shame Rdio died, it's UI/UX was far superior to Spotify. Navigating
Spotify is like have a razor blade poking out of your mouse.

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welly
How are you struggling to navigate with Spotify? I think the Spotify usability
is great. But I have been using it since it first came out and so any "quirks"
I'm possibly just used to. Still, I find it easy to use.

If you think Spotify is bad, have you tried Apple Music? Jesus, that is a
stinking pile of shit. It's awful and exactly what stopped me from using it
beyond two weeks into the trial.

Google Play Music is somewhere between the two but I find absolutely no
problem with Spotify's UI/UX. That said, I never used Rdio so don't have that
to compare it with.

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dnr
The spotify queue system is just awful. Various examples:

\- I can't just put music in the queue to play and then stop with an empty
queue. There always has to be something in "next tracks", either an album or a
playlist.

\- I can't add a playlist to the queue.

\- The queue is not synced between all my devices (spotify desktop on osx,
spotify beta on linux, play.spotify.com, android app, mopidy-spotify for home
stereo). With Rdio there was just one queue and everything played it. Spotify
Connect is trying to fix this but it's not supported everywhere yet.

\- Sometimes things I've deleted from my queue magically reappear.

\- Restarting the app (on osx) makes me lose the first song from my queue
(since it jumps back to "next tracks").

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zachwood
oh geez you just reminded me of a huge wtf on the mobile app. Whenever you get
to an album or playlist, the gigantic green button says "Shuffle Play" and
there is no way to change that.

Why is the default play button "shuffle" when I do not have shuffle turned on?

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dnr
Yes! The first time I used the mobile app I literally spent five minutes
trying to figure out how to play an album in the correct order, until I
eventually realized I could hit play on the first song. Definitely a huge wtf.
Does anyone at Spotify actually listen to whole albums?

It's so maddening I'm considering switching to Google Music, but I'm not sure
it's much better. Their mobile app has also really annoyed me in the past.

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pgrote
It would be a bummer if Pandora is sold and the service changed appreciably.
One would hope you could somehow get your ratings out of the system.

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arsenerei
Not the best, but [https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/12202/is-
there-a...](https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/12202/is-there-a-way-
to-export-list-of-pandora-songs-that-i-have-upvoted-or-downvoted).

Additionally, Pandora does have an API that allows you to pull your favorites.
[https://6xq.net/pandora-apidoc/json/](https://6xq.net/pandora-apidoc/json/)

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kylehotchkiss
Right after buying Rdio? Grr.

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a_lifters_life
I hear ya, that pisses me off.

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crudbug
If Netflix buys Pandora, the resulting entity will be an Internet Media power
house.

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livingparadox
I think it would be interesting to have google buy it. Pandora's strength
seems to come from their massive dataset of song traits. Google could probably
make good use of that data. They'd probably feed it into a neural net and see
if they can teach a machine to detect those traits, if they haven't already.

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gtk40
I already prefer auto-playlists from Google Play Music to Pandora's. I think
the acquisition of Songza probably helped.

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LandoCalrissian
I agree, Songza was a big win for them. I was really impressed at how quick
they got their features moved into Google Music, not super typical for Google.

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sytelus
I really hope they give some way to export out my ratings. Is it possible to
do that right now?

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robbiemitchell
Spotify, with help from The Echo Nest acquisition, replicated Pandora a while
ago.

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visarga
Pandora is said to be a very beautiful and dangerous woman. I am sorry to hear
she is selling herself. There's still hope, though...

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cenal
Is there a venture backed company that hasn't had this kind of conversation?

I don't see how you could raise money without having this kind of
conversation.

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doh
They are public though

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sucrose
Off-topic:
[http://ridetheclown.com/wp/saver2/](http://ridetheclown.com/wp/saver2/)

