Pandora CEO stepping down | Hacker News Reader

Pandora CEO stepping down

investor.pandora.com

66 pointshansy25 comments

A personal anecdote to demonstrate Joe's awesomeness: After hearing him give the keynote speech for Princeton's entrepreneurship conference, I was able to wiggle through the crowd of people surrounding him and blurt "Hey Joe! I loved your talk. I'm also a computer science major about to graduate and start a company that is essentially Pandora for art--there's even an Art Genome Project too [of course none of this existed at the time]. I'm moving out to Silicon Valley when I graduate this spring. Could I meet with you when I'm there and get your help?" He managed to say "Sure, my email is X" before the crowd reformed around him.

I was convinced he would forget about me or be too busy to reply to a random student who approached him after a conference (which I now know is the worst time ever).

To my surprise, he remembered me and invited me to visit him at Pandora's offices for lunch. He even took me on a tour of the whole company and showed me the "genomers" (who I remember being mostly bearded men staring into space thoughtfully while listening to music on gigantic headphones--strikingly different from Artsy's genomers today). The whole time he never made me feel like I was imposing or wasting his time. It was amazing to meet someone so successful yet also so humble and genuinely interested in others.

Joe continued to stay involved and add value even after I moved to New York. A computer scientist himself, he even helped me think through the original (very simple) similarity algorithm for Artsy's own Art Genome Project and despite how busy he must have been, would always take the time to answer my emails or get on the phone. And of course, having his name involved was critical social proof in the early days of the company.

Although I'm a proud NYC'er now, I've often said that Silicon Valley will always have a place in my heart for teaching me the value of paying it forward. And that lesson started with Joe's kind actions, without which I'm not sure Artsy would be what it is today.

I know this isn't the right venue, I don't know how else to get in touch with you, Carter.

I still have your camera that you lent me when I let you keep my backup squash racket. I didn't know you had moved to NYC without returning it to you, and I still feel pretty bad about it.

I'm sorry, but the little guy just up and stopped working. He had a good life. Can I return the favor?

he's carterac on twitter, and at artsy we use [firstname]@artsy.net for email addresses :)

I found pandora a little over 6 years ago on my first day in USA. I left all my music back home in India. A Google search for "Internet radio" introduced me to Pandora. They are the reason I found some of my favorite bands.

I don't listen to it as much now, but Pandora was the only source of music for a poor graduate student for nearly 3 years.

Did anyone else get an email saying you're one of the 4% of users that exceed 40 hour monthly usage? Can't believe it's only 4%.

(listening to Pandora now).

Probably 4% of all users, not active users. I listen to significantly less than 40/h per month because I almost never log on.

Are you a paying user? I use pandora a lot but I have a subscription $3/mo is nothing. I probably listen 5+ hours at work to suppress the sound of people talking around me.

It's only for mobile usage. Web usage is uncapped.

There may be a very large group of users who listen less than an hour per month. In other words, their population of users may include people who signed up, but rarely use it and could stretch the definition of what would be considered active users.

It's hard to see this as anything other than someone choosing to go out at the top.

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that there's about to be a big fight over royalties to the labels with Apple entering with a huge salvo today[1], and Pandora likely needs a new face in order to join the battle differently than they had in the past. In other words, "circumstances dictate."

1. http://www.macrumors.com/2013/03/07/apple-reportedly-offerin...

Here's an article on the amount Spotify pays for streams to indie artists. There's obviously a lot of hands out for pieces of the pie.

http://www.spotidj.com/spotifyroyalties.htm

Interesting. If that's not enough royalties, Spotify is charging too little. According to last.fm (who can record all track plays from Spotify), I've played 10672 tracks over the last 4 months ($55 in royalties at the 0.0052/stream rate), but paid $61.9 to Spotify for their highest premium subscription in the same time.

Pandora pays CRB rates, Spotify negotiates direct licenses with labels. They both pay out over half of their total revenues, which of course is unsustainable. Pretty much all music services are surviving off of capital infusions while keeping the price point for subscriptions palatable to the consumer. Eventually we'll see some of them pinched out of existence, unless Apple's muscle has an effect.

In Pandora at the top? Spotify seems to strictly surpass them in all dimensions.

Yea, that isn't it at all. Pandora has been on the brink of bankruptcy for years. This is a new start to try and make the business work by figuring out their licensing cost structure.

Almost at the same time, CEO of (financially) quite similar company steps down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5342655

Funny enough the press release is released through the same system, only few IDs away from each other, with very similar words used.

Does this mean we'll finally get a checkbox for "[x] Don't Play Music Recorded 'Live'" now? (Or "[x] Only Play Music Recorded 'Live'?" for people who are fans of it?)

Ok. What's the story, though?

I love Pandora, but I want to find out what is going on.

Still few exits among music tech startups.

Not exactly sure how to take your comment but Pandora is a public company, the IPO was an "exit" in the valley's sense. Maybe that's what you meant? LastFM was probably the other great example.

True. What else? No experts I know like investing in this space. What are the returns for investors to date in music startups, exactly?

I'm falling back in love with last.fm because of all they've been able to accomplish under CBS's wing. If only they'd drop the idea of "internet radio" and focus on stats.

What's the revenue proposition for a stats site? I guess they could start advertising on the webpages, but that would be a rather desperate move.

(I briefly worked at last.fm; my impression is they haven't done well under CBS, but I could easily be wrong. What do you think has improved since then?)

I'd still position it as a suggestion service, but partner with a music provider (or multiple) to deliver streaming and purchasing. They could also make money as a freemium API; all users get access to 100% of their own data, but bulk data and increased access to aggregate information would be a paid feature.

I was for a long time very frustrated with their movement after the CBS purchase, but they've been making headway recently. That's unusual, in my observations of other similar situations.

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