Three years ago, I got a phone call — Pandora was about to die.
Things were not going well for the Internet radio service at that point. The economy was collapsing, Sequoia would soon give its infamous “RIP, Good Times” presentation, and most importantly for Pandora, it was starting to look like the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) may not lower their rates. This led founder Tim Westergren to … → Read More
Yesterday, music streaming service Pandora priced its IPO at $16 per share (valuing the company at $2.6 billion). The company originally set the range of its IPO at $7 to $9 per share, at a market cap of $1.3 billion; but upped the range last week to $10 to $12 per share, giving the company a valuation of $1.9 billion. Today, Pandora debuted, under the symbol ‘P’ on the New York Stock Exchange… → Read More
As we reported earlier, Pandora will start trading tomorrow on the New York Stock Exchange under the single letter symbol “P”. By doing so, it becomes the first Silicon Valley consumer Internet company to join the exclusive one-letter stock ticker symbol club.
That club was once reserved for the big blue-chip industrial companies: Chrysler (C), Ford (F), Sears (S), U.S. Steel (X), and Woolworth… → Read More
Music streaming service Pandora has priced its IPO at $16 per share, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. The company originally set the range of its IPO at $7 to $9 per share, at a market cap of $1.3 billion; but upped the range last week to $10 to $12 per share, giving the company a valuation of $1.9 billion.
Pandora’s stock will begin trading tomorrow morning on The New York Stock Exchange… → Read More
Music streaming service Pandora has just filed a new version of its S-1 that indicates the company will be upping the price range of its stock to $10 to $12 per share, giving the company a valuation of $1.9 billion. That’s up from Pandora’s recently pricing of its stock at $7 to $9 per share, at a market cap of $1.3 billion. Pandora’s stock will be traded on The New York Stock Exchange under the… → Read More
In Silicon Valley the terms of venture capital deals, the prices of valuations and the real stories of ousters are routinely dished, whether they always show up in the press or not. Sure it’s all off the record or on background or whispered at a coffee shop, but people who live here love what they do and when companies and valuations grow this quickly, it’s hard to keep the juicy details under… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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.
Lots of love in digital circles.
Being Swedish I’m guessing they’re fantastic dressers and… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
By now, you’ve undoubtedly heard about all the big features of both iPhone 4 and iOS 4 (the artist formerly known as iPhone OS 4, which we heard about previously). But something that Apple didn’t address too much today was a feature I’m most looking forward to: background tasks. I’m pretty sure that being able to run apps like Pandora in the background while I do other things on the iPhone is… → Read More
Remember when Pandora was on its deathbed? Yeah, those days are long gone. The service has just raised yet another round of funding, we’ve confirmed. The round was led GGV Capital and participated in by Allen & Company, They’re not disclosing the amount raised, but you can bet it’s fairly substantial considering that their last round in July of last year was $35 million. Up until now, Pandora… → Read More
Pioneer is taking a big step in bridging the two landmasses of Internet radio and vehicle entertainment. By utilizing a free iPhone app, Pandora Link, the company is bringing Pandora to two of its latest systems, the Pioneer AVIC-Z120BT and AVIC-X920BT navigation systems. Simply run the app and connect the iPhone to head unit with the USB cable; the in-dash radio system will then displays all of… → Read More
Believe it or not, it’s actually quite hard to take an idea from concept to render to prototype to production. Sure, inside Microsoft you can do it in a couple hours (if they don’t assassinate the project), but what if you’re just a group of guys who want to put together a really awesome open-source handheld game console? We’ve had our eye on the Pandora for a long time, but the project has been… → Read More
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