The job that Pandora is doing for its customers is that the company is providing a music streaming service. Its user base consists of customers who stream music for free (the main base—their streams are interrupted intermittently by advertisements) and those who pay for streaming (via subscription—the minority base). The users can enjoy unlimited hours of diversified music for free, only having to endure ads every so few songs.
By basically allowing users access to a huge pool of free content that can be streamed without charge, Pandora is essentially giving music away for free: it pays for the content (the company is charged a royalty fee for every song that is streamed) and since its user base is enormous and growing by the hundreds of thousands every day, the company is paying a lot in royalty fees—more, in fact, than it is making from its advertising revenue.
The effect is that Pandora acts like an Internet radio station. A radio listener is not obliged to pay for what is heard—the station makes money from selling advertising or from collecting donations or grants. Pandora relies upon advertising but is now considering charging its user base a fee for listening—either in the form of a subscription or in the form of a freemium (a user who listens to more than 40 hours of music per week would have to pay a dollar).
The company exposes listeners to a lot of new music that the base might otherwise never hear or be exposed to—so by charging users a small weekly or monthly fee, the company may not risk losing its user base, since there is still a discernible exchange of value that can be identified.
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Other Internet stations provide these services as well—I Heart Radio, iTunes, Amazon, SiriusXM, and others offer streaming services. What separates Pandora from the others is that up till now, users have basically been able to get their music for free. Pandora has been able to secure such a large user base...
He doesn't mention Apple's iPod, iPod Touch, and iPad, but those devices also pose a challenge for traditional radio broadcasting. People can "…select music that suits their individual tastes and many have wider repositories of music in their own libraries" -- thanks to the iTunes and similar services -- than are offered on the playlists of radio broadcasters (Picard, p. 1). Moreover, Satellite and Internet radio are offering "hundreds of
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