Pandora has lost $100M in just three years

[Victorious Secret]

Controversial streaming radio platform Pandora has posted a net loss of  US $30.4m for 2014 – meaning it has now lost over $100m in just 36 months.

 

 

Yikes, thats a lot to be losing despite their increased revenues year over year. But honestly, with how expensive it must be to run a streaming service like that and having to pay more for licenses to record labels, its surprising they aren't losing even more. Hopefully Pandora tips the scales in 2015 and shakes itself free of these overall loses. 

 

 

Annual revenues at the New York-based company in 2014 were up to $920m, a 44% jump on 2013’s $637.9m haul. However, this tally still slightly missed Pandora’s forecasts, plunging its share price down more than 20% after hours.

 

Pandora’s main source of income is advertising, which jumped 40% year-on-year in 2014 to $732m. Subscription and other revenue stood at $174.3m, up 38% on the prior year.

 

 

The firm’s biggest expenditure by far is ‘content acquisition costs’ – primarily licenses from labels and publishers paid to SoundExchange and/or the likes of BMI and ASCAP in the US – which stood at $446.4m in 2014, up from $342.9m in 2013.

Pandora’s other big cost is its own marketing and sales operations, on which it spent $277.3m in 2014, compared to $182.2m in 2013.

 

In the three months to end of December 2014 (Q4), Pandora posted total revenue of $268m and a net loss of $12.3m – an increased quarterly loss on Q4 2013’s $9m figure.

 

 

http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/pandora-now-lost-100m-three-years/

[Tedster]

Meanwhile, I've just been reminded that they've even existed in the first place...

[Pugs501]

♪Ouch♪

[Guest]

Not a fan of Pandora, I know some people like the random selections, but I'm gonna go listen to what I want to listen to on youtube or foobar

[Guest Kloaked]

I wonder what they will be compared to Spotify this year.

[werto165]

I thought it was pandora the jewellery shop. 

[J_DeMan]

It still doesn't work in Canada. Guess that would cost even more.

[MonkeyFace]

 

Looks like record companies are gobbling all the cash from the streaming services too. How does Aloe Blacc only get $4000 from Pandora and Spotify from co-writing/producing "Wake Me Up"?

[Toddwjp]

basically the record companies and organisations and what nots are charging way too much

[hiyayhi]

This is somewhat surprising and yet somewhat not.

To be honest though, I used to use pandora a lot, but recently I have not touched it because of how random it is. I much prefer the method of Spotify, or even just having the music in foobar, and choosing what I listen to.

 

Probably 99% of my music I own in CD form too, and sometimes it is nice to put on a CD, but most of the time it is nicer to just select a file in foobar.

 

I tend to use Spotify and Pandora as a way of discovering new music that I will then go out and buy, be that on bandcamp or an actual CD store.

[Yog]

This might be somewhat misleading. They're not technically losing money but investing it into future revenue...the value of that investment depends on how their self advertising pays out and whether or not their music collection has expanded, something the article doesn't mention. Take Amazon as an example. Amazon often posts quarterly losses and a lot of people who don't know any better flip out and say scream "HOW CAN THEY BE LOSING MONEY?!!?!!?" and then sell of whatever stock they had in the company but the reality is Amazon reinvests a great deal of its revenue into new projects...Amazon's net share of the market keeps going up and the value of that goes up as well...they're doing fine, they're just not sitting on their money. The same sounds like it might be true about Pandora...the article just doesn't go into more details.