
SiriusXM to Acquire Pandora - prostoalex
http://blog.pandora.com/us/siriusxm-to-acquire-pandora-creating-worlds-largest-audio-entertainment-company/
======
peterlk
I haven't had a chance to rant about this in a while, so, I'll warn you that a
rant is ahead.

I get the sense that the pendulum is going to start swinging back again soon.
The media companies have almost won control again, and they're going to repeat
the same mistakes that they made before. The difference now is that they have
the internet under fuller control. PirateBay, Grooveshark, Limewire, Napster.
Those are the music distribution channels that I grew up with because the
media companies squeezed too hard. I'm happy to pay for music, but I'm not
happy to pay 5 different subscriptions to listen to a small amount of their
libraries. When I buy music, I want it to be mine. I don't want to have access
to someone else's music. It's my collection. My impression is that people
haven't realized this yet, but they will.

Soundcloud is a zombie - effectively dead. They abandoned their business model
so they could grow more, and ceded power to the large record labels.

Try looking for Jay-Z's "The Blueprint" on Spotify.

How many people do you know who have a Deezer account?

SiriusXM's acquisition of Pandora is like Verizon's acquisition of AOL.
They're grabbing the long tail of users and platform integrations so that they
have the negotiating power with Universal, WB, and Sony to push out the same
music that our parents (and now, even their parents) listened to.

I, for one, welcome the consolidation. The harder you lock the sidewalks down,
the richer the underground becomes. And the underground is where creativity
thrives.

The solutions to illegally acquired music will have different technical
implementations, but the same effect (ipv6 feels like it will be necessary in
this), and my suspicion is that we'll start heading back that way in the next
few years.

~~~
squiguy7
> When I buy music, I want it to be mine.

For me, Bandcamp has been the best site that holds true to this idea. My
favorite band started releasing all of their music through Bandcamp because
the pricing is fair for artists. And as a listener, I can download the music
to my machine or stream it from the app after I have purchased it.

~~~
WorldMaker
Yeah, I try to search artists I find on Bandcamp first.

Also, CDBaby and Magnatune are still great sites for their respective niches.

(CDBaby started as a more traditional CD distributor and has moved
increasingly into digital distribution, as opposed to Bandcamp starting with
digital distribution and moving to physical distribution. Anyway, CDBaby has a
larger back catalog of "older" stuff, and still some cases of for instance
bands don't have digital distribution rights to their own stuff, but piles of
old CDs to sell.)

(Magnatune is a "not evil" record label. So their content is limited to just
stuff they've "signed", but it's a beautiful, eclectic mix of stuff. Much of
which you'll see reused in small to medium projects such as the videogame
Braid's soundtrack, because their licensing has a good spectrum from non-
commercial Creative Commons usage to relatively affordable commercial usage.)

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owaislone
The only amazing music streaming product I've seen was already acquired and
killed off: Rdio.

It was heads and shoulders above the rest, especially when it came to
international content and recommendations. Their recommendations were amazing.

~~~
tjbarkley
I miss Grooveshark.

~~~
Spivak
Don't get me wrong Gooveshark had possibly the best UI of all the streaming
services but it was largely successful because all the content was pirated.

~~~
tjbarkley
I know. I wish they had been able to go legit. As someone who went to UF (for
CS) soon after they closed, I missed having a company like that in the area.

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ranrotx
My gripe with SiriusXM is their pricing model (worse than the cable company).
You only buy it when they have a special which makes it 50% off, that is
actually a fair price. However in 6 months it will auto-renew at the public
rate, snd they hope you won’t notice or you’ll be too lazy to call.

Their call center is horrendous but at least if you threaten to cancel they
will magically find another special that’s good for 6 months. Wash, rinse,
repeat.

Don’t even get me started with their additional fees that they try and mask as
being regulatory/licensing. That’s their freaking business, to license content
so they can broadcast it. Just like the airlines, it pisses me off when they
try and pass their cost of doing business (actually the whole basis of the
product) off as an additional fee.

I will never do business with them again due to these deceptive practices.
Hopefully I’m not the only one.

~~~
josefresco
You could replace "SiriusXM" in your comment with "<insert your ISP here>" and
it would still be 100% relevant. Fortunately for you, SiriusXM is easily
replaceable ... your ISP? Not so much.

~~~
lvh
My ISP doesn’t have anywhere near as shady marketing practices. Does yours
regularly ignore do-not-call and do-not-mail requests? Do they send misleading
envelopes that don’t have their brand on the outside? Mine (AT&T) doesn’t.

~~~
josefresco
I was speaking specifically to their predatory "intro rates" and added fees
which obscure the actual price of the service.

~~~
dylz
Comcast most definitely does this in my area, and even withholds higher speed
tiers unless you bundle with TV and phone.

Luckily, I have the choice of getting gfiber for 1/3 the cost of comcast.

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dave_aiello
SiriusXM is more than a music service that competes with Apple Music, Google
Play Music, YouTube Music, and Spotify. It is currently the only streaming
service where I can get news and a wide range of live event programming via
one app and/or the head unit in my car.

Acquiring Pandora could be huge for SiriusXM provided they integrate Pandora
into the SiriusXM app and don't raise SiriusXM packages beyond the historic
rate of package price increases.

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crummy
Both services seem like great ideas that have largely gone extinct. Radio that
you never lose reception with... streaming music with a user-seeded
playlist... just hard to get excited about in 2018. Or 2008 really.

~~~
compcoffee
> _Radio that you never lose reception with_

And sadly this isn't even the case. I recently purchased a new car that came
with the SiriusXM 3-month trial. We drop reception in the country and in town
(among tall buildings). In fact, it drops more often than mobile internet (why
doesn't XM have 10s buffer?).

The subscription is also more expensive than Apple Music or Google Play Music
and the car comes with Android Auto and CarPlay. How they expect to compete is
beyond me. I guess that's why they bought Pandora.

~~~
josefresco
> why doesn't XM have 10s buffer?

It's odd because some of the first generation Sirius radios touted "DVR" like
functionality, which makes it clear that buffering is possible. I would
imagine they started to phase out that element of the hardware because of cost
(especially since most are bundled with the vehicle)

In the same line of thinking, my navigation apps (Google Maps and Waze) also
glitch out when driving through extended length tunnels (under Boston for
example). I find this odd given that the app knows my route, and these tunnels
are used by millions each year.

~~~
joezydeco
I worked on some of those XM radios with the DVR/buffering capability, before
the merger.

Really, it was just limited to the amount of storage you had. I think the one
I did allowed up to 30 minutes but of course you lost it when you switched
channels.

The music is so insanely compressed (the _best_ channels were 32 kbit AAC+)
and RAM/Flash is so much cheaper now, it could really be anything you wanted
these days.

The satellite signal itself has a bit of time diversity in it (in case one of
the birds disappears), like about 1500 mSec worth, as well as terrestrial
backup transmitters in most cities (SXM's dirty little secret), so if you
really have loss of signal you must be underground for a while.

~~~
brewdad
I lose reception in the forests outside my metro area. Exactly the place I
would most want to use it since I have more than a few enjoyable radio
stations available to me in the city. When I lose reception on them, I also
tend to lose reception on XM. At least enough to be annoying.

------
Deimorz
Discussed earlier today here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18058748](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18058748)

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ranman
Pandora used to have a CLI that I would use daily - I could hop into a tab and
+ or - a song and get a constantly updating playlist. I haven’t used it in
years though.

~~~
Spivak
Pianobar?

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PretzelFisch
I think this will be a good thing, it shows SiriusXM is going to extend their
online presence which currently runs for $10 a month. If this price point
starts to includes Pandora it's pretty compelling. Nice channels that are
curated with a dj if you like or a well developed algorithmic playlist. As a
business it's good they realize groth won't be coming much from their
satellite network.

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jdlyga
To be honest, I haven't seriously used Pandora since around 2006 or 2007. It
was wonderful for music discovery before the rise of smartphones and streaming
services. I've had the Pandora app on my phone for years, but I rarely ever
use it. I don't see how it can compete these days. So Sirius XM totally makes
sense.

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chuckgreenman
I really like Pandora as a discovery service, for some reason Spotify's Radio
feature isn't quite as good yet.

~~~
kyle-rb
Agreed; I discovered a lot of music through Pandora. In my experience Spotify
tends to stagnate on the artist you seed the radio station with, whereas
Pandora introduces more variety.

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blobbers
Why is everyone reporting this deal is worth 3.5B. It's worth 2.5B.

~~~
umeshunni
Pandora's press release says so [http://blog.pandora.com/us/siriusxm-to-
acquire-pandora-creat...](http://blog.pandora.com/us/siriusxm-to-acquire-
pandora-creating-worlds-largest-audio-entertainment-company/) "we announced
that we’ve entered into an agreement to be acquired by SiriusXM, in an all-
stock transaction, valued at approximately $3.5 billion"

They're presumably paying a premium on the current stock price.

~~~
blobbers
Do the math yourself.

