Pandora, the personalised internet radio service for music, goes from forte to fortissimo, announcing on Wednesday it reached 40m registered users this month.
At a media dinner the previous evening attended by Tim Westergren, Pandora founder and hosted by Crosslink Capital, the VC which led a Series C round for Pandora, Peter Rip, general partner at Crosslink elaborated on its success.
Revenues in the latest quarter were up more than double on a year ago, he said, and Pandora is the prime candidate in Crosslink’s portfolio as VC firms look to bring their best companies to market in 2010.
The Bay Area company has straightened out its business model, relying now on advertising revenues rather than subscriptions, and shaken off royalty-payment problems after reaching an agreement with artists and record labels in the US in July. (Its international expansion is still stymied by a failure to reach similar agreements abroad.)
Mr Westergren said the iPhone and iPod touch were a main driver of growth, although Google’s Android was becoming a significant platform – downloads of its application in the iPhone App Store were around 25,000 a day, compared to 17,000 a day in the Android market.
Pandora is becoming a popular in-car choice with its users, who are connecting their iPhone to their car speaker systems. Mr Westergren said Pandora was looking to extend to every major platform where an internet connection was available for its streaming service.
The 40m figure represents a doubling of Pandora users in 2009 and it is currently adding at nearly 600,000 a week. Its iPhone user base is up 400 per cent over the past year, growing from 2m registered users last December to 10m this month. The service has also spread to other platforms such as the Roku set-top box and Sonos music system.
Pandora achieved a 44 per cent share of Internet radio listening hours in October and is growing in appeal to advertisers – it has nearly twice as many daily visits in the 18-24 age group compared to Hulu and ESPN.
Mr Rip pointed out that Pandora appeals to every demographic, with users able to personalise their channels or stations to hear everything from religious music, to jazz, classical, rock and R&B.
