from Hacker News

SiriusXM buys Pandora for $3.5 billion

by bithavoc on 9/24/18, 3:55 PM with 96 comments

• by chollida1 on 9/24/18, 4:08 PM

  Poor Pandora and their investors. This is for about a quarter of what they were worth just 4 years ago.

  Saddly this is almost all self inflicted.

  While Spotify, Apple music and Google music really worked hard to get people to actually pay for the service Pandora continued to act like it was a VC backed company in hyper growth mode long after that was the case.

  They fought with the record labels longer than most of their competitors did to their own determent and they didn't end up getting any concessions for their extra effort.

  And when everyone else was letting you select any music you wanted in playlist, they insisted on staying radio style only.

• by wil421 on 9/24/18, 4:29 PM

  Cancelling Sirus is always interesteing. I always say I don’t want to pay the $90 or however much for 6 months of access. No $50 is also too high. How about $30? Ok sure I’ll pay.

  I think Sirus only makes money off the folks who forget to cancel after the promotional period. It’s like $20 a month and I’ve forgot to do it my self for a couple months.

  Pandora always had the best selections on their radio channels. Spotify is not as good for random radio selections. I would never pay for Pandora after having so much music available on Spotify or Apple Music.

• by neuigkeiten on 9/24/18, 4:27 PM

  I used Pandora in the distant past.

  These days I mainly use http://www.gnoosic.com for recommendations and then look for the artists on the web, Youtube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud etc.

  Not sure if that makes me one of a kind?

  This approach gives me more of a "discoverer" feeling then using one monolithic service that spoon feeds me my musical life.

• by chrisweekly on 9/24/18, 4:57 PM

  Spotify Premium for family at $15/mo is still gonna be pretty hard to beat. But. IMHO SXM has been doing a great job with exclusive content like recent live recordings (eg phish and other jambands), which is immune to the "shazam->spotify" escape hatch I'd otherwise use. They are desperate to get onto people's devices, and as the early leader in the space Pandora's still got "eyeballs" (eardrums?) galore in terms of installed user base. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out....

• by clay_the_ripper on 9/24/18, 8:39 PM

  I think this is really exciting actually. I LOVE SiriusXM because their radio is curated by an actual DJ. You get to hear so many tracks that algorithmic services like Spotify never would surface. I use both Spotify and SiriusXM as for me they fulfill very different use cases. Spotify is for playing what I want to hear and Sirius is for when I want a human with deep expertise in a genre to play things for me.

  For me, an algorithmic feed of music just isn’t interesting. Music is art, and art is for humans, not computers.

• by unsignedint on 9/24/18, 7:30 PM

  Recently, I got Pandora Plus through T-mobile promotion. I was enjoying it until one day, while driving, I got "Can't skip due to licensing restriction" which reminded me of the scene in Fifteen Million Merits from Black Mirror...

  What worse was it was bit off from type of song I asked for, and particularly I couldn't stand to listen to. I switched back to Google Play Music, which has a mix of my own uploads and (smaller for things in my taste, but doesn't complain I can't skip) music from the service.

• by relaunched on 9/24/18, 4:13 PM

  This makes me side. I am a long-time, paid subscriber. We'll see what happens next, fingers crossed.

  I'm not sure if this was a win for the team or a mercy killing. But, if someone can explain what's in this for customers, that would be very helpful.

• by conception on 9/24/18, 10:14 PM

  Whenever there is an exit like this I like to remember that for just 4B, Sirius could have had a Star Wars franchise instead. These valuations are nutty.

• by bentona on 9/24/18, 4:42 PM

  Other sources [1] mention a "go-shop" provision, which allows pandora to shop the deal around. I'm wondering if this is likely to result in any alternative deals?

  [1] http://investor.siriusxm.com/investor-overview/press-release...

• by honkycat on 9/25/18, 1:43 AM

  I never liked algorithmic DJs.

  They don't really expand my horizons and play the same crap over and over.

  My favorite is chirpradio dot org. Real DJs who are real music buffs.

• by josefresco on 9/24/18, 4:44 PM

  I have used Pandora (happily) for years. Just downgraded my subscription to the "free" level as I have too many streaming music providers and needed to reduce cost. SiriusXM (paid), YouTube Music (paid, new), and Pandora (free) are my streaming services. Trying to build up my YT library now, as Pandora has over a decade of my "likes".

• by landa on 9/24/18, 11:18 PM

  It's such a shame that Pandora didn't do anything with rdio.com. Rdio was the best music service I've ever used. Not only was the music high quality, but the UI was very intuitive on all devices, and it also had cool features like if you're playing Rdio on your laptop, you could use your phone as a remote control.

• by temuze on 9/24/18, 9:35 PM

  Not a bad exit for a company that raised a Series... H?