Internet radio Pandora buys Rdio streaming service in the hope of competing with major players

The other day it became known that the company Pandora, which provides Internet radio services, acquired for $ 75 million the key assets of the well-known music streaming service Rdio. Earlier, the latter declared itself bankrupt in the northern district of California, USA, although in October last year received direct investment from the parent company Pulser Media in the amount of $ 108 million.

Pandora CEO Brian McAndrews (Brian McAndrews) said that this purchase will definitely help the company in further development. “Our company aims to become the source where users will search for new music and enjoy already familiar melodies,” Brian said in an official statement about the deal. “We want to create a common music resource that will combine listening to music on the radio, accessing a specific album on demand or a concert of a favorite artist.”

He stressed that from now on his company owns the rights to the technology and intellectual property of Rdio and can now compete with such major players as Google Music, Spofity and Apple Music. The very same company Rdio will be officially closed, and most of the employees offered jobs in Pandora. At the same time, the head of the bankrupt service, Anthony Bay (Anthony Bay) has already announced that he does not plan to go under the wing of the new owner.
')
Curiously, Pandora founder Tim Westergren (Tim Westergren) spoke out against the policies that Spotify and YouTube’s video hosting service have preached, calling the model for providing unlimited access to music "unsustainable." Now, after buying Rdio, the company will surely try to please the music labels that are against the same Spofity, and offer a new way to listen to music, combining the good old Internet radio service with a vast base of 79 million users (almost all of them live in the US ) and acquired streaming service. Most likely, the on-demand listening service will be offered as a paid addition to the subscription for a small amount.

Note that this is not the company's first major investment over the past few months: Pandora acquired Ticketfly, a start-up offering concert tickets, for $ 450 million, which allowed the company to cover concert performances, and in May 2015 it was announced that it was taking over a small project, Next Big Sound, whose team was engaged in analytics of new music, trying to determine the patterns of popularity or failure of a particular song.

The Rdio service was founded in 2010, and at the time of its closure it had operations in 100 countries around the world, offering access to 13 million songs. Two years ago, the service exchanged 15% of its current capital for $ 75 million from the American radio company Cumulus, which allowed it to enter the global advertising market and even get an estimate of $ 500 million.

While Pandora is expanding its business and trying to impose a struggle on the streaming music market, its competitors continue to grow. So, Spotify announced the creation of a free special service Fan Insights, available exclusively to musicians and people from the music industry. The new service is designed to help representatives of show business to get information about the audience. It is for this purpose that Spotify has previously acquired companies such as The Echo Nest and Seed Scientific - both are engaged in collecting and analyzing "musical" information. By the way, Pandora pursued a similar goal by purchasing the Next Big Sound startup mentioned above, so in the near future we can expect the appearance of a similar service from a well-known Internet radio. Do not forget about the other major players who trade in the industry of musical streaming. Here we are talking, of course, about the “whales” of Apple Music and Google Music, which will definitely create something like this - it is only a matter of time.