Here’s a thrilling new idea: For the low price of $10 a month, music service Pandora will give you on-demand access to a millions-strong library of songs from artists across the world. Plus, playlists, personalized radio stations, and more!
Ah—wait.
It’s not the premise of Pandora’s new Premium subscription plan that’s the problem; rather, the sheer repetitiveness. In a blog post announcing Pandora Premium today, the company boasted about the platform’s ”completely reimagined music service” that can “open up a world of music completely unique to you.” There are more than a dozen music streaming services offering near-replicas of the exact same deal, down to pricing, features, and even marketing language.
To its credit, Pandora Premium—which will roll out in early 2017—pledges a number of niche features, such as a music-recommendation engine built off of data from its current base of 78 million casual users of online radio-style listeners. But the platform will inevitably come up against the same issue that SoundCloud, and any other new music streaming service that’s tried to make a name for itself in 2016, does: this is a market that’s almost been squeezed dry by bigger players.
Industry leader Spotify $SPOT currently claims around 40 million paying subscribers; Apple $AAPL Music is now at a close second, announcing yesterday that it’s hit 20 million. The rest of the pie is being desperately grabbed at by players like Tidal and Amazon $AMZN, the latter of which only stands a chance in music streaming (despite a late entry) because of its already-massive base of general consumers.
For Pandora, it’ll almost definitely be a case of too little, too late.
