Music streaming service Pandora has just filed a new version of its S-1 that indicates the company will be pricing its stock at $7 to $9 per share. Pandora’s stock will be traded on The New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “P.”
According to the filing, Pandora aims to raise as much as $141.6 million in the offerring, and will offer offering 5,000,682 shares of its common stock with the selling stockholders are offering 8,683,318 shares of common stock in the IPO. The pricing of the stock puts Pandora’s valuation at over $1 billion. → Read More
Personalized radio service Pandora has reached a major milestone: last week it recorded its 10 billionth thumb (and it was a thumbs up).
Avid fans of the popular service already know what that means — for the rest of you, Pandora lets users mark the song that’s currently playing with a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. The effect is pretty straightforward: hit a thumbs up and Pandora will try to play more music that sounds like the song you’re listening to, thumbs down and Pandora will immediately jump to the next song and send a minor electric shock to CTO Tom Conrad.
In other words, these thumbs are explicit signals that users are sending to Pandora to help fine-tune their radio stations, and it shows that plenty of people actually try to take advantage of the personalization features as opposed to just letting the radio play in the background all day. → Read More
I just read that Spotify is coming to the U.S! Oh, wait. That was an article from 2009. I hope they really mean it this time. I love the product. To grease the skids for them a bit, I’ve put together a little travel guide for what they can expect in advertising and media circles when they do arrive.
Being Swedish I’m guessing they’re fantastic dressers and that their accents will make even the Brits envious. American agencies all have European envy, and Spotify is certifiably a big deal abroad. Agency status meetings will be preceded by Absolut and herring in honor of Spotify’s arrival. → Read More
In Silicon Valley it’s not just who you invest in that matters– it’s also when you invest in them. The earlier the investment, the riskier the bet. But the more jawdropping the returns if the company hits it big. It’s so lopsided, that typically just 5% of those unsure early bets create some 95% of the entire venture industry’s returns. Miss one of them, and it haunts you for years. Snag it, and you can brag for even longer. This simple reality is precisely what makes the venture business hard, and the justification for why partners make such huge fees.
So what’s up with the surge of the strongest early stage firms jumping so heavily into late stage mega-deal fray? Have the Valley’s superstars lost sight of these rules or are the rules changing?
Earlier this year, we wrote a lot about the shift in power at the early stages with the rise of super angels, but you could argue there are far greater ripple effects to this new late stage frenzy. That’s not only true for the Valley, it’s true for the stock market. And you could argue, those ripple effects are less well-understood. → Read More
In case you missed it, being a super angel is officially passe. The new hotness is having a late-stage growth cash. Sequoia Capital is doing it. Andreessen Horowitz is doing it. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is doing it. Accel is doing it. Hell, even Chris Sacca is somehow doing it.
Greylock is the latest to officially join the club, with news today of an expansion to its current fund, bringing the total to $1 billion– almost double its original $575 million size. The firm will be able to invest up to $200 million per deal. But other than having more cash on hand, not much else at Greylock is changing. The firm has been doing growth deals already, most notably Pandora, which has filed to go public and the recent Groupon mega-deal. → Read More
Music streaming service Pandora has filed to go public. It could end up raising as much as $100 million. Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan are co-managing the deal. The filing puts them on track for a mid-2011 IPO, as we reported earlier.
Some financial stats from the SEC filing: For the first nine months of 2010 it lost $328,000 on revenues of $90 million. (Michael Robertson’s $100 million revenue estimate we published earlier this tear was pretty damn close). Pandora’s fiscal year ends on January 31 (weird), but in the prior full year ended on January 31, 2010, it lost $16.7 million on revenues of $55 million. So you can see how much it got its fiscal house in order since then, adding $35 million in revenues and practically eliminating its loss. → Read More
At CES this week, Pandora made two announcements that get its popular Internet radio service into cars, one for Toyota and one for BMW. But while exciting, the reality is these are still hacks that use your smart phone to solve the big car Internet radio problem: Connectivity.
It’s a big problem but a crucial one for Pandora to solve if it wants to realize its mission of being wherever radio is. According to Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad, 50% of all radio listening happens in the car– and frankly I’m surprised the number is that low.
I pulled Conrad away from the madness of CES to ask him when I’d be able to buy or rent a car and see AM, FM, CD, Satellite Radio and Pandora– all native. Hint: The only thing Pandora has ruled out in getting there is becoming an automaker. → Read More
Back in August we reported that Elevation Partners had signed a letter of intent to buy secondary shares in Pandora, the long-suffering, now-hot online radio station. I wondered what ever happened to that deal, so I started digging. As it turned out, shares were sold but Elevation didn’t get them.
Here’s what we’ve been able to piece together, from several sources on different sides of the negotiating table. → Read More
Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first.
In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (FourSquare). Is the game over? Have Facebook & Twitter won or is their another act? No prizes for guessing … there’s always a second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) act in technology. So where is social networking headed next? I make eight predictions below.
1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable
Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook. There is growing pressure on Facebook to make this portable and they have made some progress on this front. Ultimately I don’t believe users or society as a whole will accept a single company “locking in” our vital information.
Facebook will succumb to pressure and over time make this available to us to allow us more choice in being part of several social networks without having to spam all of our friends again. I know in 2010 this doesn’t seem obvious to everybody but it’s my judgment. Either they make our social graph portable or we’ll find other networks to join. I predict this will come before the end of 2012. → Read More
Navigating the choppy waters of ad-supported music, We7 hasn’t been afraid to change course. The UK startup began life as an innovative free music download service before transitioning to an on-demand browser-based offering. While most recently the company, which is backed by Peter Gabriel, Eden Venture and Spark Ventures, made a premium paid-for play with a desktop and mobile version sans-advertising.
Today, We7 is shifting focus once again in the belief that the route to mass market requires a lean-back experience more akin to Internet radio services like Pandora in the U.S. rather than a pure on-demand play such as European competitor Spotify. It’s also a model that sits more comfortably with We7′s ad-supported aspirations since music licensing fees for Internet radio are about a third of that charged for non subscription on-demand services. → Read More
Navigating the choppy waters of ad-supported music, We7 hasn’t been afraid to change course. The UK startup began life as an innovative free music download service before transitioning to an on-demand browser-based offering. While most recently the company, which is backed by Peter Gabriel, Eden Venture and Spark Ventures, made a premium paid-for play with a desktop and mobile version sans-advertising.
Today, We7 is shifting focus once again in the belief that the route to mass market requires a lean-back experience more akin to Internet radio services like Pandora in the U.S. rather than a pure on-demand play such as European competitor Spotify. It’s also a model that sits more comfortably with We7′s ad-supported aspirations since music licensing fees for Internet radio are about a third of that charged for non subscription on-demand services. → Read More
Who says nobody will consider paying for streaming music? Thumbplay Music, which offers unlimited music streaming apps for a monthly subscription across iPhone (iTunes link), Android, and Blackberry, reports that its smartphone apps have been downloaded 500,000 times since June. Thumbplay won’t say how many of those downloads turn into paying customers (you get a free trial before having to start paying $9.99 a month), but even if it’s only 10 percent, that’s $500,000 a month in revenues. → Read More
So now that we’re very much approaching Opie & Anthony D-Day—Friday is the contract deadline, even though the contract actually expires on October 1—we need to ask ourselves: are we ready to drop Sirius XM if the boys don’t sign another contract? → Read More
TiVo already has an impressive lineup of internet apps on their DVRs but the offering just got a little more musical thanks to Pandora. Nearly all of Pandora’s trademark features including access to the Music Genome Project is available in the app. Users can thumb up or down artists and create personalized radio stations on the fly. Existing Pandora users can sign into their accounts or new accounts can be created via an on-screen interface — no computer required.
Pandora is just the latest app to hit the TiVo Premiere platform. It joins other music apps such as Rhapsody, Live365, Music Choice as well as Netflix, BlockBuster, and YouTube. It clearly signals that TiVo is commented to adding killer applications to their devices although this update is probably the first of many that passes-over older TiVo boxes such as the Series3 or HD line. The company moved to something totally different with the Premiere and the older platforms might not get all the goodies as the new model. Oh well. I guess it’s time to upgrade. → Read More
Remember the Pandora handheld gaming console? The one that runs Linux, is open source, and designed by committee? Well, they did finally get the first 1,000 pre-orders shipped, and they are expecting to send out another 3,000 before the holidays. → Read More
The hits just keep on coming for Elevation Partners, the one-time digital media, private equity dream team that has reconfigured itself as an investor in late stage Web 2.0 treasures. Earlier this summer, Elevation requested an extension on investing its $1.9 billion fund, and TechCrunch has learned that that request was denied—a move that came as surprise to us and to Elevation, we hear.
So what does that mean? Clearly, LPs are sending a strong message that has to do with Elevation, but also has a lot to do with the broader market: They want to see some returns before they pony up more money. But the news isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds. → Read More
Yesterday at the New Music Seminar in New York, the streaming music recommendation service Pandora announced that they now have 60 million listeners registered. This is up from 50 million in April, and 40 million in December. Before that, it took them all over 2009 to double in size from 20 million to 40 million. In other words, the service is now adding users faster than ever.
And that shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone who has used the service. While it’s great on the desktop, it’s even better on mobile devices. And now that they’re on iPhone, Android, and several other mobile devices, it is becoming sort of the de-facto new version of radio. And with the release of iOS 4 for the iPhone, Pandora finally got another killer feature: the ability to stream music in the background. I have no doubt that usage is skyrocketing thanks to that — Pandora has long been one of the all time most popular iPhone apps. → Read More
With more than 50 million users and a recent infusion of cash, music streaming service Pandora is really hitting its stride. Founder Tim Westergren had his Charlie Rose moment last night, and one thing that really cam ethrough was how important the iPhone is to Pandora.
“It is impossible to overstate” its impact, saays Westergren. When the iPhone app launched in 2008, it was an instant hit, and it “almost doubled” Pandora’s growth rate “overnight,” says Westergren. But more than that, it freed up Pandora users from being chained to their desks. In the first clip below, Westergren talks about Pandora’s iPhone and the iPad strategies. In the second clip, he explains to Rose, Pandora’s underlying Music Genome project. → Read More
This is a guest post from Michael Robertson, a 12-year veteran of the digital music business. He is the founder and former CEO of digital music pioneer MP3.com. He is currently the CEO of music locker company MP3tunes. Until recently he was an adviser to Google Voice following the acquisition of Gizmo5.
Pandora is the widely popular web radio service. Publicly they have said that they turned the corner to profitability in the 4th quarter of 2009. Below I forecast the 2010 numbers for Pandora using information from Pandora, music royalty rates that all webcasters are obligated to pay, and standard expenses of running a California based technology start-up. → Read More
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