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June 23, 2010

Comments

Richard Harker

HDRadioFarce, our "beef" is with those who have declared Pandora the online winner and successor to broadcast radio. While it is a spectacular marketing success (which we have noted in our posts), it remains to be seen whether the product is as transformational as its boosters claim. We think it is too early to tell.

Any of a number of services may ultimately prevail. Right now Pandora has all the attention, so we've written more about it, but we've also written about Jelli, and we intend to write about other services.

As far as fearing any of the services might be a threat to radio, we have cautioned broadcasters about the threat many times. No hidden agenda there. We believe market forces will do their job, and listeners will ultimately decide who wins.

Richard Harker

James, thanks for your observations. We do a similar calculation of "hours tuned" modeled after Canada's BBM. With the published numbers, it is probably the best way to compare broadcast to streams. We'll have a post on the subject soon.

Regarding Pandora's already low and declining TSL, all streams are measured the same way, so the fact that Pandora has lower TSL than all the broadcast streams is curious, and the fact that it is declining relative to the broadcast streams is even more curious. As we point out, we have a trend of only seven months, so things may change.

Terry Purvis

If Pandora was doing it's job as hyped, the TSL ought to be greater than terrestrial radio.

In the end a jukebox is and always will be nothing more than a jukebox and there are thousands available on the Internet.

I have never understood what was meant to make Pandora so different, in fact there is no difference between it and all the rest of the jukebox services "redefining radio".

But from what I see Pandora is creating hype to gain investment, and we all know where that leads.

The most interesting thing about the whole Pandora story is how the "experts" have swallowed the bait.

HDRadioFarce

You all seem to have a real beef with Pandora. Perhaps, it is because Pandora, Last.fm, Jango, Slacker, etc are such a threat to terrestrial and HD Radio? Your link is definately off my blog, now. Put yourselves on-par with Paragon and Jacobs.

James Anderson

I looked at some of the numbers and it appears that the average session lasts around 45 minutes.

Take that time, and multiply say .75 by the number of session starts, and you get the true number of hours listened, I think I saw it go up slightly to .81 hour recently but the session starts went down slightly.

So the total time spent listening is somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 million hours based on the recent data.

Various factors can account for the low TSL, wireless smartphone listening is one, and it also shows how the TSL per session may not be the way to look at it. You get up in the morning and maybe have a station on for a few minutes, then go in and shower and shave, then have breakfast listening, then you turn that one off and go into the car, listen the however long it takes to go to work.

You may listen lobnger at work if the content filtering doesn't block the stream, then repeat the process again going home.

Someone said that the average listener, not session, listened 11 hours a month.

So what we really need is how many unique users were there, and how much time they actually listened. May be hard to come by.

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