AllThingsD » Pandora

SoundCloud Starts Pushing Its Own Native Ads Out of a New York Outpost

Peter Kafka — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:00:00 +0000

There is an increasingly long list of digital outlets pushing their own version of “native advertising” — ads that want to convince people that they’re just like “real” content.

Now add another one to the list: SoundCloud, the digital audio platform, is trying to court brands with its own specialized ad unit. This one lets a marketer stick what amounts to a moving billboard behind the startup’s signature “waveform” audio units.

Here’s what one of those looks like, from Blue Bottle Coffee:

SoundCloud officially rolled these out in March, but the concept is so new that CEO Alex Ljung said the company hasn’t figured what to charge for it, or how the mechanics will work. That’s one of the reasons he has hired Dan Gerber, a sales vet from Pandora, to open up a New York office next month; SoundCloud started out in Berlin and also has an operation in San Francisco.

“There’s a lot of interest from other brands that want this, and we’re taking it out step by step. We want to build this out,” Ljung said.

Up until now, SoundCloud has only made money with a “freemium” model, where most of its users pay nothing to upload and play audio files, and a small minority pay a monthly fee for extra features.

But just like lots of other Web services that started out ignoring ads, SoundCloud figures its future will involve them, after all. See: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. SoundCloud has raised more than $60 million in the last few years, so it’s not surprising to see them start playing with ads themselves.

One of the challenges for all these platforms is that every one of them requires advertisers to experiment with a new format, which reduces the chance that any of them will truly scale. (See Felix Salmon’s excellent BuzzFeed analysis for more on this.)

Ljung argues that his audio files reach an audience of 200 million people a month (SoundCloud used to provide “registered user” numbers, which told you how many people could conceivably upload an audio file, it but doesn’t anymore), so presumably that will entice some brands.

On the other hand, audio advertising on the Web is still in its embryonic stage, as a Pandora vet like Gerber knows very well.

Spotify Takes a Page From the Twitter Playbook, Buys Music Discovery App Tunigo

Peter Kafka — Fri, 03 May 2013 14:07:50 +0000

Last fall, Twitter bought We Are Hunted, a “music discovery” startup that made a popular app for Spotify.

Apparently Spotify is paying attention: It just bought Tunigo, another music discovery startup with a popular Spotify app.

Spotify isn’t announcing terms for the deal, but says that all of the Swedish company’s 20 or so employees will come to work at Spotify’s offices in Stockholm and New York.

The Tunigo Spotify app will keep running (there’s also an iPhone app), but presumably Spotify’s new hires will be put to work on Spotify’s main service, which has 24 million users and six million paying subscribers. Tunigo had reportedly raised $3 million.

The We Are Hunted and Tunigo deals aren’t exactly parallel, since Twitter used We Are Hunted to build a brand-new music app, and Spotify doesn’t need one of those. But they do show that digital music companies are putting a renewed emphasis on helping people find stuff they like — which has the obvious benefit of keeping them on the service longer, and/or convincing them to pay for them.

Internet radio service Pandora has always been about discovery, but lots of other services have been content to assemble millions of tracks and ask listeners to poke through them on their own, or to ask their friends for recommendations.

Now lots of companies are starting to emphasize curation. That’s the entire point of Jimmy Iovine’s new Beats/Daisy music service, scheduled for launch later this year. And if Apple is able to hammer out deals with music labels — last I heard, they’re still stuck haggling with Sony Music and Sony/ATV, its related-but-separate publishing company — it will launch an iRadio service that combines elements of both Pandora and on-demand services.

If you have a Spotify subscription and haven’t played with Tunigo, by the way, it’s worth checking out: Like Web radio service Songza, it is focused on mood- and theme-based playlists, and it’s pretty good.

Twitter Takes On Music Discovery, but Comes Up Short

Bonnie Cha — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:00:15 +0000

Back in my day, discovering new music and bands meant listening to the radio or going to Tower Records to sample albums at the listening stations. Now there are all sorts of apps and services to help you do that, right from the convenience of your smartphone, including a new app from Twitter.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, it’s a social networking service that lets you broadcast messages, called tweets, about what you’re doing or thinking, in 140 characters or less. People can follow you to receive your updates, and conversely, you can follow people you find interesting.

[ See post to watch video ]

The new app, called Twitter Music, helps you discover new music and artists based on what people are talking about on the service — both within your network and the broader Twitter audience. The free app is currently only available for iOS devices, though Twitter plans to bring the service to Android. Twitter Music also works on any Web browser.

I’ve been testing Twitter Music on my iPhone 5 for the past week, and it’s a beautifully designed app. It helped me keep abreast of what’s popular, and turned me on to a couple of new artists. The Web version also worked well, and it was nice to be able to navigate through the various sections on a bigger screen. That said, Twitter Music as a whole has limited capabilities.

For example, you can’t create a playlist or listen to multiple songs by one artist in sequence, so it’s not a replacement for other music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify — nor is it meant to be. Rather, it’s more of a complementary service than an adversary.

The app’s value is largely dependent on how active you are on Twitter. While you’re not required to have a Twitter account to use the app, you’ll get more from it if you do, since it offers personalized recommendations based on the people you follow. Still, it puts the onus on the user to follow musicians and share what they’re listening to, which might not be appealing to everybody.

Twitter Music is divided into four sections: Popular, Emerging, Suggested and #NowPlaying. Popular shows you the 140 most popular new songs on Twitter, while Emerging surfaces 140 up-and-coming artists found in tweets. Both of these lists are constantly changing, depending on what’s trending at the moment on Twitter.

The other two sections are designed to be personal to you. The Suggested section offers recommendations based on the musicians you follow on Twitter, and NowPlaying shows what your followers are listening to. There’s also a search function, but you can only look up artists, not particular songs.

Navigating among the sections is easy. You can either use the drop-down list at the top of the page, or you can swipe left or right.

Each page is presented with an attractive grid view that displays the album covers for all the artists on that list. Tapping on an individual square will bring up a slightly larger image, where you can start following the artist on Twitter with a tap of a button, visit the artist’s Twitter profile page to see which musicians they follow, and listen to a 30-second preview of their song.

The preview is powered by iTunes, and you don’t have to leave the app to hear the clip, which is nice. If you’re sold after 30 seconds, there’s a button to purchase the full track from iTunes.

You can listen to an entire song if you are a Spotify Premium or Rdio Unlimited subscriber, though both of these services cost $10 a month. I’m a Spotify Premium member, and after entering my login details in the Settings menu, I was able to listen to full tracks with no problem.

While a song is playing, you can tap the spinning record icon on the bottom left of the app, which brings up a music player interface. Here you can fast-forward and rewind a song by moving the record in clockwise or counterclockwise, adjust the volume and tweet what you’re listening to. With the latter, a preset message is written for you, such as “#NowPlaying @Alabama_Shakes – Hold On,” with a link to the track, but you can add a custom message, as well.

Overall, I found the app to be well designed and easy to use, but I had mixed feelings about its usefulness.

The Popular section wasn’t filled with many surprises. It’s populated with a lot of today’s pop hits from artists like Justin Timberlake, Rihanna and Bruno Mars. It would be nice if there was a way to filter songs by genre.

The Emerging page was a lot more interesting to me. It introduced me to a ton of new artists that I’ve never heard of, and there were a handful of bands who piqued my interest, such as Guards and Houses. The problem is once I heard a song, I wanted to hear more from that particular artist, but there’s no way to do that from Twitter Music. Instead, you just have to take note of that artist and check them out on another service like Spotify.

The Suggested section is supposed to offer you personalized recommendations, but in order for this to work, you have to already follow artists on Twitter. Prior to testing the app, I didn’t follow a ton of musicians, so my Suggested page was nearly empty. I only follow people if they have interesting things to say, so if there’s an artist who rarely tweets or only sends messages to promote concerts or new albums, I’m not going to follow them, even if I enjoy their music.

Bottom line: I don’t want to be forced to follow people just to get music recommendations. I prefer something like Pandora, where I can create an artist-themed radio station and listen to a stream of their songs and musicians who are like them.

NowPlaying wasn’t particularly useful to me. If one of your followers has tweeted what they’re listening to, then it shows up in this section. I follow more than 300 people on Twitter, but only four people actually broadcasted what they were jamming to, so this section of the app was also barren. This could change as Twitter Music grows and more people use it.

For those who are heavily engaged in Twitter, the app offers a bare-bones way to discover new music. But for everyone else, there’s no compelling reason to use it over existing music services.

Where's Amazon Going With Music, Movies and TV Shows? Ask Media Boss Bill Carr.

Peter Kafka — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:40:47 +0000

It’s no secret that Amazon has very big ambitions when it comes to digital media. But the company doesn’t ever say much about them, save for the occasional Jeff Bezos product rollout.

But here’s the guy to ask: Bill Carr, who heads up Amazon’s digital music and digital video groups, which now include Amazon Studios, the unit that is going to make original movies and TV shows for the e-commerce giant.

Carr doesn’t talk much, but last week I got the chance to sit down with him at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Amazon is as tight-lipped as Apple when it comes to new product discussions — or lots of other stuff you and I would like hear about — so I didn’t even bother asking him about Amazon’s new TV box. (Still: Count on it.)

But if you read between the lines, you should at least be able to get a sense of what Amazon is thinking as it contemplates beefing up its music offerings, and as it goes head to head with Netflix (and everyone else) in digital video. Here’s an edited version of our chat:

Peter Kafka: A couple years ago, Amazon and Google and Apple were all racing to develop music-locker services. But we don’t hear much about them anymore. How is Amazon’s locker working?

Bill Carr: The fundamental things about cloud music storage that works for all consumers is that it backs up everything, it’s in a safe place. I can access it from all of my devices, it’s simple. I don’t have to think about it. People don’t want to manage their music, they want to enjoy their music. Every consumer likes that.

What may have more limited appeal is how many consumers want to pay $25 a year to do that for all of their music.

Are you surprised about the take-up rates for the $25 a year option?

No. I don’t find that surprising.

The locker services seem like part of a larger trend where big platform companies like you, Apple, Google, are trying to get people to move their media into your own clouds, and end up committing to one ecosystem or another.

It may be that other companies think about it that way, because their goal is that you only use their devices. But that’s not our goal. Our goal is to free you up to use whatever device you want. Which is why we support any kind of PC, any kind of Mac, iOS devices, Android.

Our goal is to be ubiquitous on any device people might want to use. It’s a big investment for us to make all those apps avilable. But our goal is not to lock you into any one ecosystem.

Do you think you can keep doing that? It seems like we’re moving back toward a walled-garden world.

I can’t speak to other people, and what decisions they may make that may prohibit us from enabling our app. But we’ll work very hard on behalf of our customers to make sure our app is available on the devices they use.

You first started selling MP3s in 2007, and for a while it seemed like you weren’t making any headway against iTunes, which dominates the business. But now, at least according to NPD, you have 22 percent of the download market. What changed?

We don’t release any details about where we stand. But what I can say is that we have seen customer growth in our service every year. We have year-over-year growth in sales and in customers. And the way we’ve accomplished that is by building more solutions for customers.

Is your locker service helping sell more music? Are Kindle Fires helping you sell more music?

There’s no doubt that with the trend toward connected devices, mobile devices, our customers are realizing that it is super convenient to buy once and play it anywhere, and make it available on any of their devices. That’s working, and driving more sales.

Now it seems like there’s a move away from music sales and toward access — either from subscription services like Spotify, or free Internet radio like Pandora. You guys don’t offer anything like either one of those, but there are reports you are considering them. Should we expect an Amazon version?

We don’t speculate on what we might do in the future. But we’re also listening to our customers about other ways they’d like to enjoy their music. We’ll always look for the next innovation.

But you’re not philosophically opposed to subscription or ad-supported music?

Not at all. As a company, if we constrained ourselves to certain definitions, then we wouldn’t have gone nearly as far for our customers.

What about the idea of bundling music into Amazon Prime, like you do with video? Right now, there’s no connection between Amazon Prime and music.

We’re always thinking about distinctive experiences — how can we provide something for our customers that’s going to solve important problems for them? We’re always thinking about those things.

When it comes to video and Prime, it seems like your approach to your subscription service has changed. From the outside, it looked like, initially, you simply wanted to build up a catalog, and you weren’t very picky. More recently, it looks like you’re focusing on specific titles and catalogs.

The part I would disagree with is that we’ve never been thoughtful, or cared about the content. We have reams of data, based on years of being in both the transaction video business and the DVD/Blu-ray business, to know what our customers want to watch. And we’ve used that information to help bring them the right videos.

I think what has changed is — yeah, obviously, we have been increasing our investment over the last two years that we’ve been in this business. And I think it’s fair to say that increasingly you’ll see more and more content on Amazon that’s exclusive.

Why does exclusivity matter?

I think it’s very important for our customers. In some cases, it’s the only way to get some of the best shows. If we want those shows, in many cases the way that business shakes out is you can either have it exclusively, or not have it. More importantly, we are looking at what our customers like, and we want to have a set of movies and TV shows that are only on Amazon.

Why does that matter?

For the same reason that you can only see “30 Rock” on NBC, or “House of Cards” on Netflix, or “Girls” on HBO. It gives users a reason to tune in and try our service.

Are people watching many videos via Prime? Again, from the outside, it seems like there’s not a lot of use. There was a Sandvine study that showed Amazon very far behind Netflix last fall, and people I talk to who sell you programming don’t think you have a a lot of viewers.

We don’t disclose the details. But I would say we’ve seen strong triple-digit growth in terms of rate of use. We’re very pleased.

In the investor letter he published last week, Reed Hastings set up Netflix as a direct competitor with HBO. Do you also think Amazon is competing with them?

HBO’s a wonderful company, and has been a great partner to us. Our customers love HBO programming. I can’t speak to Reed’s strategy. But we’re building … I don’t think there is a another service like ours. It’s not like HBO. There’s at least three, four different ways to get movies and TV shows that you want on Amazon.

Hastings said he’s competing with HBO for customers’ time and money, but also now for content. Are you seeing that conflict coming with Amazon?

My ambition is to make sure that we create something that is its own service, that is not like HBO, Netflix or any other service, with its own unique value proposition. A lot of companies have a competitor focus. We have a customer focus.

Like Netflix, you are producing your own original programming. Earlier this month, you put up 14 TV pilots and asked people to vote on them. Why are you getting into originals, and why are you doing it that way?

The primary reason is because we’re committed to the idea of reinvention, and that we think that there’s great value for our customers if we get this right. And the reinvention is, “How do we get a lot more feedback from our customers early in the process? How do we remove gatekeepers from the process, so that great ideas can come from anywhere in the world, and get made into movies and TV shows? And how do we create a collaborative environment, where different creators can work in an open environment, to produce more exciting ideas and exciting stories that customers want to hear?”

So you think there’s video out there that could be made, and should be made, but isn’t, because of the way the existing production process works?

A simple example of that is what we’ve done in books, where we’ve created an open platform for any author to submit their books, through Kindle Direct Publishing. That removes gatekeepers from the process, and opens up all kinds of possibilities for people to become authors. So, why can’t there be great possibilities for people who have great stories to tell, whether it’s a script or screenplay?

It’s a journey for us. We’re flexible on the tactics of how we get there, but firm on the strategy.

If you look at the pilots you put out this month, it seems you’ve used a fairly traditional approach, and are working with lots of established talent. Only one of the 14 pilots — “Those Who Can’t” — came in over the transom. And even in that case, those guys were fairly established. Will that change?

Just the fact that that show came in from an online submission — I would consider that to be remarkable. That possiblity doesn’t exist in the traditional system today. And the idea that we’ve put all 14 pilots out for free, for anyone to watch, with the explicit ask for customers to give us feedback — I think both of those things are remarkable.

Are you surprised by any of the feedback you’re getting on the shows so far?

The point isn’t what I think about it. I didn’t spend a lot of time forming my opinions about it. I have shows that I prefer, but my views don’t represent the views of all of my customers. It really isn’t what I think about the shows, it’s what my customers think.

Do you think the comments you’re getting on the shows will be useful?

I think we’re getting really insightful information on all of the shows. How accurate it is is something we’ll discover over time. Because there has to be a feedback loop, and you have to see what happens in the real world.

This is a multiyear process. If you’re focused on reinvention, it requires you to experiment and collect data. And then try new experiments.

Among Big Properties, Apple and Amazon Have Greatest Portions of Mobile-Only Users

Liz Gannes — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:00:18 +0000

Thirty-five percent of U.S. visitors to Apple properties in February were mobile-only, compared to 22 percent for Amazon and Wikipedia, 17 percent for Facebook, 14 percent for Google, 11 percent for Yahoo and 5 percent for Microsoft. So says comScore.

That makes sense, given that Apple preinstalls a whole bunch of key apps on iOS (though some of us have stopped using some of them), and gives us little reason to go to its websites.

It’s also pretty clear why people would shop on Amazon and look things up on Wikipedia on the go, even if they don’t do these things on their desktop every month.

The folks who measure how many people visit websites have been slow — sloooow — to count up mobile Web, smartphone and tablet users. But comScore is catching up, with its new “Multi-Platform” rankings that combine desktop, Android and iOS usage by U.S. users. (What would really be great is global numbers, but this is a start!)

These are the same new rankings we wrote about in November, but today is their official launch out of beta. From now on, they’ll come out every month.

The order of the Top 10 U.S. properties are remarkably unchanged when you add mobile, though. The only significant gainer at the top is Apple, which comes in at slot No. 8, with comScore calculating an incremental audience of 54 percent.

ComScore notes that the average Top 100 property adds 38 percent to its audience when you count mobile-only visitors who wouldn’t previously have been included.

The biggest mobile gainers were Groupon at No. 47, with 36.9 million visitors, an incremental percentage gain of 223 percent; Zynga at No. 44, with a 211 percent gain — echoing the company’s bragging about mobile-only users on its last earnings call; and Pandora at No. 19 with a 183 percent gain. Aside from those three, nobody else in the Top 50 had a triple-digit mobile bounce.

Pandora Jumps on Results; CEO to Step Down

Rex Crum — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:29:26 +0000

Pandora Media Inc. reported better-than-expected results for the fourth quarter on Thursday afternoon — giving its stock a sharp boost despite the surprise additional news that its CEO plans to step down.

Pandora P also projected a revenue range for the current quarter that was above Wall Street’s estimates. The stock jumped more than 19% in after-hours trades.

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Jimmy Iovine Explains His $60 Million Music Plan

Peter Kafka — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:42:28 +0000

Hey, Jimmy Iovine! You just got $60 million to launch a new subscription music service!

What are you going to do with it?

The legendary music producer, executive and headphone marketer hasn’t spelled out all of his plans just yet. We’ll have to wait until later this year to see exactly what he’s going to roll out to compete with the likes of Apple, Spotify, Pandora and perhaps Google (x2).

But last month at D: Dive Into Media, he gave Walt Mossberg a pretty good sense of what he’s working on — a highly curated service, as opposed to the robot+friends approach most of his competitors use — as well as a history lesson on the rise and fall of the music industry.

Here’s the entire interview:

[ See post to watch video ]

Why Google Thinks Two Music Subscription Services Are Better Than None

Peter Kafka — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 05:58:14 +0000

Alrighty. Time to start sorting out what Google is up to with music. And why it thinks it may make sense to launch two different music subscription services.

Spoiler alert! No one outside of a handful of Googlers really knows.

But we can make some educated guesses:

As previously reported, Google’s Android unit wants to launch a subscription service.

This one’s a no-brainer. Music is a key part of mobile, and Andy Rubin doesn’t want to cede that to outsiders like Spotify and Pandora. (Android’s effort to break into music via a download store and a scan-and-match locker have had little take-up.) And this one is relatively easy for music owners to sign off on, since they’ve already bought into the Spotify model — free ad-supported music that pushes users into a $10-a-month mobile offer.

As previously reported, Google’s YouTube unit wants to do … something with a subscription service.

At a minimum, YouTube is trying to collect the rights to sell music, in both audio and video form, via subscriptions. But it hasn’t told music owners what it actually wants to do with those rights, and it hasn’t shown outsiders a prototype of what it’s working on.

This one also has some logic to it, but it’s not quite as clear-cut. More on that shortly.

Before we get there, though: Regardless of what you’ve read about timelines (“imminent,” or “Q3,” or “2013,” or “sometime” are all options), none of this can happen if Google doesn’t get deals with the music owners.

Right now, as Billboard reports, Warner Music Group has signed on to both ideas. I hear that Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music label, is interested, but is at least a month or so removed from inking a deal. But industry sources say that Sony Music is resistant to all of this. For now.

Even if Google gets all three of the big labels on board, it’s not home free. It needs buy-in not just from the people who own music, but from the ones who own the publishing rights — the underlying compositions for each song.

Sometimes those rights are owned by the big-three labels, but sometimes they’re not. And particularly outside the U.S., Google will need to make peace with the agencies that represent music owners. That could be tough, given that its relationship with some of them is frequently fractious.

So there are lots of ways this could get slowed down/crippled/derailed.

One encouraging sign that all of this could get done is the fact that Google is no longer insisting that music owners negotiate their deals with both an Android team and a YouTube team. Instead, YouTube content head Robert Kyncl is representing the search giant in all of its talks — though the deals are still going to get done separately.

Small beans? Sure. But at least it shows the Googlebots are beginning to grok the way the humanoids in the content business would like to work.

For argument’s sake, let’s say Google does get all of its deals done. What next?

The Android scenario is relatively easy to map out. Google has yet to show a competence for selling content, but its huge installed base will still make it a serious contender. And that will be an issue not just for Spotify, but Pandora and Apple and anyone else with a vested interest in digital music. At a minimum, it could make Android phones more attractive and/or harder to switch away from. And that may be enough to make Rubin happy.

The YouTube version is harder to nail down. As many people have pointed out, YouTube already functions as the world’s biggest digital music service. That’s in part because of the official music videos it serves up in conjunction with Vevo, the video company it is set to invest in.* But mostly because of all the music that its users upload to the service, with homemade visuals and without permission, which ends up staying there with the blessing of the music owners.

So why does it need to sell music? As Eliot Van Buskirk notes, all of that free music may be the reason YouTube is talking about subscriptions. Offering a paid version may make the music owners more likely to keep their free stuff up there, too.

Background: In olden days, music owners got paid a small fee every time someone played their stuff on YouTube. All those small fees added up, which was nice for the labels, but a real problem for YouTube, particularly when it didn’t have much of an ad business to absorb those costs.

Fast-forward to today: Now the music owners get a cut of the ads YouTube shows when it plays their songs. Much better for YouTube, but music owners grumble that they’re not making enough. And their deals are all up for renewal right now.

Subscriptions can solve problems for both sides. YouTube can tell music owners that it’s providing a funnel to encourage people to actually pay for music. And the music owners can let YouTube hang on to what may be its most valuable asset, which it can keep offering for free.

I don’t believe music subscriptions indicate a real change in Google’s plans for YouTube, though. As far as I can tell, Google fundamentally sees the site as a giant advertising platform, and I don’t think a new music product changes that. Just like the talks YouTube is holding with other content owners about other subscriptions.

I also don’t see how YouTube’s audience, which skews very young and probably hasn’t bought a thing from Google in their lives, is likely to pay for any of this stuff.

But if subscriptions — or even the idea of subscriptions — help convince YouTube’s partners to keep supplying their stuff to the site, then that’s probably good enough to keep everyone happy.

*As far as I can tell, none of the subscription talk affects Google’s plan to renew its Vevo deal and put money in the site. The reason the Vevo deal hasn’t been finalized, I’m told, is because its closing has always been contingent on Google wrapping up other deals with the labels, including subscription rights, as I reported earlier.

What Could Apple Buy With Its $137 Billion? About 18 Homes Each for Every Yahoo to Not Work At, and More!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 03:34:28 +0000

Last week, the fight between Apple and pugnacious hedge fund investor David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital went all flat when he withdrew a lawsuit after the company yanked a proxy proposal that would have allowed shareholders to vote on eliminating preferred stock from the company charter.

But the real issue at the core of the fight — the massive mountain of $137 billion in a cash hoard that Apple holds and that Einhorn wants it to distribute in some fashion to shareholders — still remains.

It’s not clear what Apple will do now, especially since a lot of it is overseas. But execs have indicated that they are evaluating what to do to best serve nervous investors, who have bidded the stock down 40 percent since the fall. While it’s not clear what that will be, it’s also pretty likely Apple will do something.

Until the company decides, though, I have some good ideas for CEO Tim Cook to consider:

* Apple could purchase 1,567,506 Tesla Model S Performance vehicles with 85 kWh battery and a carbon fiber spoiler at $87,400 each, which would effectively allow CEO Elon Musk to buy the New York Times (a bargain at $1.42 billion!) and use it as his own personal blog.

* It could buy 17.9 houses for each Yahoo employee located near its Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ, so they could be super-close to work, per CEO Marissa Mayer’s wishes. That breaks down to 206,015 overall homes for 11,500 workers, at a median sales price of $665,000 for the area.

* Apple could acquire a big chunk of the Internet all at once, including Groupon ($3.36 billion), Yahoo ($25.95 billion), Facebook ($61.7 billion), Twitter ($10 billion), LinkedIn ($18.32 billion), Yelp ($1.47 billion), AOL ($2.81 billion), Pandora ($2.09 billion), Zynga ($2.69 billion), OpenTable ($1.32 billion) and, finally, Pinterest ($2.5 billion). Phew.

* It could pay Andrew Mason’s $378.36 severance after getting jacked as CEO of Groupon 364,013,179 times over.

* Apple could pay for 97,857 parties for Yammer’s David Sacks’s 40th birthday (at $1.4 million each). Snoop Dogg included.

* It could foot the bill for the budget cuts to save the U.S. government $85 billion this year, so Americans could stop having to say “sequester.”

* Apple could buy $329 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi iPad minis for 416,413,374 people — everyone in the U.S. (315,429,318), plus France and Spain.

* Or it could just give the 7,069,909,686 people on the planet $19.38 each, and call it a day.

* Apple could use $1 bills to carpet an area of 560 square miles, which would more than cover Silicon Valley.

* Finally — and I think this would be a nice gesture to make up for calling his efforts a “silly sideshow” — Apple could give Einhorn 15.56 times the value of his $8.8 billion fund.

Or, of course, not.

Pandora to Introduce 40-Hour Monthly Limit on Free Mobile Listening

Nathalie Tadena — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:22:03 +0000

Pandora said it will introduce a 40-hours-per-month limit on free mobile listening, as the Internet radio company looks to manage rising royalty costs.

In a blog post on the company’s website, Pandora said the new limit will affect less than 4 percent of its total monthly active users. The company said the average listener spends about 20 hours listening to Pandora across all devices in any given month.

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The Science of Investing: Hearst's New Venture Arm in $30 Million Funding Deal With Los Angeles Tech Studio

Kara Swisher — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 02:40:05 +0000

Hearst Ventures, the investment arm of media giant Hearst Corporation, said it was making a minority equity investment in Science, the Los Angeles area tech “studio.”

Privately held Hearst is the sole investor in the new funding, although the company declined to reveal financial terms of the investment.

But sources with awareness of the deal said it was close to $30 million for a stake above 20 percent.

Somewhat akin to a startup accelerator, Science is attempting to quickly create and scale a number of promising companies in a variety of areas, and has launched 13 so far.

Among the Santa Monica, Calif., tech studio’s recent efforts: Dollar Shave Club, a subscription-based products company aimed at men; Ellie, which sells high-end activewear for women; and Wittlebee, a clothes club for kids.

Hearst Ventures is operated by Hearst’s Entertainment and Syndication unit, which is run by Scott Sassa and George Kliavkoff. Kliavkoff will join Science’s board of directors.

“It’s clear to us that, while we have these brands that resonate with consumers, we think there are some learnings we can get from these guys that are hard to get in a big company,” said Sassa. “Being able to be nimble with insight and guidance is important for us.”

Kliavkoff also noted that this was a way to get immediate ownership in a range of promising companies. “We are writing one check and will have an immediate stake in more than a dozen great startups,” he said. “[Science] has been very thoughtful in starting companies in smart areas.”

In a statement, Hearst CEO Frank Bennack said: “Hearst is continually looking for smart investments that bring value and intelligence to the company — our investment in Science does both. We’re excited to partner with Science to continue its trajectory of success, gain meaningful industry knowledge and utilize Science’s platforms for current and future Hearst investments.”

Though quieter than most, Hearst Ventures have made many successful investments over 15 years, including in Netscape and Broadcast.com. More recently, it has funded such companies as Brightcove and Pandora, as well as HootSuite and BuzzFeed.

Science was founded in late 2011 — with $10 million funding from big-name investors including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and White Star Capital. Its CEO is well-regarded entrepreneur Mike Jones, who was most recently CEO of Myspace. Prior to Myspace, he had started and sold Userplane to AOL in 2006. In addition, well-known entrepreneur Peter Pham is chief business officer at Science.

“I am very proud of work that the Science team has accomplished since launching,” said Jones, in a quick interview tonight (short enough so that his wife would not get angry at me for ruining Valentine’s Day). “I am extremely excited about opportunities for Science companies going forward.”

More to come, but here is the very clever viral video that Dollar Shave Club did on its launch:

Automakers Open Their In-Car Platforms: First Up, Ford, and Soon, GM

Liz Gannes — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 22:00:19 +0000

Cars are getting smarter and more connected, but there still seems to be a small variety of app icons sitting on the dash — usually Pandora radio, in-car navigation and not much more.

But 2013 looks to be the year automakers move beyond a few pre-approved partnership-driven test apps and into the great unknown.

Today, Ford is announcing its developer program, which will allow app developers to connect their Android and iPhone apps to Ford’s SYNC voice-activated interface.

But don’t expect to be playing Angry Birds on your dashboard as you’re driving down the freeway. The so-called “open platform” for an auto interface will have a high bar for approval of new apps.

“It’s as open as we feel comfortable to make it. Developers can be as creative as they want, but we do reserve the right to be selective under safety concerns,” said John Ellis, Ford’s global technologist for connected services and solutions.

As of today, developers can register to download Ford’s AppLink SDK. Then they can submit a Ford-compatible app for review “to ensure it works properly and is suitable for use in the vehicle.”

There already seems to be significant latent interest in developing for the Ford platform. In the lead-up to this launch, Ford collected 4,000 developer sign-ups on its website.

But Ford isn’t the only automaker trying to attract developer interest for its increasingly open platform. General Motors, which is also gearing up for a big launch at CES later this week, held a hackathon this weekend where about 20 projects were developed for the GM platform.

While the details of GM’s full announcement aren’t out yet, the hackathon projects included an app that allows users to remotely update in-car navigation with new destinations — the idea is to extend a “honey-do” list while your partner is already out doing errands — and another called “meet me in the middle” that suggests restaurants and cafes halfway between two GM drivers’ locations.

Ford was the first major auto company to jump on the connected-car bandwagon; the AppLink program dates back to 2010. At first it only included a few apps — Pandora (of course!), Stitcher and a couple more.

That small library has grown over time, and today at CES, Ford partners are launching quite a few more apps: In social media, Sina; in news, Wall Street Journal radio (where, full disclosure, AllThingsD reporters are sometimes featured), USA Today and Kaliki; in music and entertainment, Amazon, Aha Radio, Rhapsody and Greater Media; and in navigation and location, Glympse and BeCouply (a bit of an oddball, in that it provides date ideas on the go). Some of these apps will soon be live in Europe and Asia as well.

The next big step is for carmakers to provide app developers with vehicle data. That will allow for apps to be built around interesting and car-specific topics like fuel efficiency and ride sharing.

Vehicle data is “very near on our roadmap,” according to Julius Marchwicki, Ford’s SYNC AppLink program manager. GM seems to be further along on that front, with vehicle data mentioned in a developer website that’s already live.

The other big question is how integrated automakers want to be with existing platforms, and how much they require developers to build on top of car systems — which unfortunately often seem to be a takeoff of the interfaces we get on our smartphones and tablets, only with more pixelation and awkward hierarchical menus.

There are a range of perspectives on that issue — for instance, Kia and Hyundai said last week they will add Google Maps into their navigation systems.

Ford’s strategy is to have developers incorporate its voice-activation and vehicle interfaces into their apps for Android and iPhone apps, so they are distributed through familiar marketplaces to drivers’ existing cellphones.

But there are some hiccups with that strategy — for example, on the iPhone, Ford cannot open a new application; the app must already be open for the car system to engage with it.

The GM developer portal, meanwhile, indicates that the company is choosing more of an HTML5 open Web app strategy, though we’ll hear more about that soon.

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Facebook Pushes Out Gifts to All U.S. Users (Complete With Holiday Booze)

Mike Isaac — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 15:00:09 +0000

Continuing the charge to ramp up its social gifting product well into the holiday season, Facebook on Tuesday announced the wide rollout of Gifts to Facebook users in the United States.

Previously, the product was in a limited invite-only mode, slowly spreading across the site user by user. When one person sent a gift to another, the recipient would then be able to start sending gifts to others (much in the way Google rolled out invites to Gmail and Google+ in the early days).

Currently, most of Facebook’s gifting options are food and lifestyle related, including cookies and cupcakes, stuffed animals and other relatively low-cost items.

But Tuesday’s wide Gifts rollout also comes with another gifting option: Wine. And lots of it. Facebook has partnered with 16 different wine makers, letting folks send each other bottles of red and white over the network.

Not so fast, eager teenagers. Facebook has put into place a number of age-verification safeguards to keep minors from sending booze to one another. Users under 21 can’t send or receive alcohol via Gifts. And even if the kids somehow get around those barriers, the delivery service will still card you at the door to make sure you’re as old as you say you are.

As the biggest shopping days of the year approach, Facebook has made it clear it wants to be a player in e-commerce. After rolling out physical Gifts in the fall, the company upped its game with the addition of some digital subscription options as gifts, including music and video services Rdio, Pandora and Hulu. And just last month, Facebook announced an agreement with Apple, letting users send one another iTunes credit to download music and movies.

To be sure, Facebook is no Amazon or eBay at this point. The gift offerings are minor, and the company has a relatively small number of retail partners offering gifts on the service.

But the idea that Facebook can eventually convince users that it’s more than a social network — that it’s a place to spend money with your stored credit card information — is far more valuable than any incidental revenue made up by customers’ Gift purchases.

Perhaps come the time the company’s next quarterly earnings details are filed with the S.E.C., we’ll see just how many users Facebook wins over with Gifts.

Spotify's Daniel Ek on Profits, Label Deals and Angry Musicians: "We're Doing Really, Really Well"

Peter Kafka — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:56:28 +0000

Spotify’s big press event accomplished a few things today: It gave CEO Daniel Ek a chance to boast about growth, to show off new features designed to help users find new music and to make his case to musicians who think they’re getting shortchanged by his subscription service.

What Ek didn’t talk about: Any fundamental changes to the way the service operates — anyone can use it for free, and subscribers who pay $10 a month get extra features. And he didn’t mention any plans to change its marketing strategy, which to date has been largely dependent on word of mouth and a big boost from Facebook.

That’s because things are working well the way they are now, Ek said in an interview after the event. Equally important is his assertion that Spotify’s business model is sound, and that the company can succeed without big changes in the way the music business licenses its product.

If that claim pans out, it means Ek will have won where just about everyone else has failed. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation:

Peter Kafka: Your event today was mostly about product changes. But you have to be a current Spotify user to appreciate the changes. How will the changes help you bring in new people?

Daniel Ek: I think the social part is really core to this. Social isn’t just about engaged people who are already on the platform. It’s also about sharing that music on other networks. So now I have all this great content, like the playlist Bruno Mars created, and I can repost that onto Twitter, on to Facebook. I believe that’s really great content that a lot of people will want to click on.

But I could already share songs and playlists on Twitter and Facebook from Spotify.

What we’re doing is removing friction. We’re making it a lot easier for people to do that. We’re making it a lot easier for people to find great content to share.

So if you make the product better it makes me more inclined to share really interesting stuff?

Yes. We’re creating a viral cycle, where new people are able to discover new content.

Since Spotify started it has been oriented around this idea of playlists, and sharing playlists. That made sense for some people, but not for a lot of other people, who were just trying to figure out how to listen to an album. Now you’re changing that — what took so long?

We look at what our users are doing. There were a lot of users who were perfectly happy with just playlists. What we realize now is that as we’re appealing to a much broader audience, we also have to support both. And we’ve been wrestling for quite a long time to figure out the balance, and we think we’ve finally done it.

Today was all about product stuff. No changes in the way the business operates, or the value proposition you’re offering. Will that change, and does it need to if you’re going to grow?

Would we ideally like a lower consumer price? Yeah. But at the same time, we’re doing really, really well as it is. And that’s reflected in our numbers.

Can you guys succeed as a business with the way your label deals are structured now? Pandora is struggling with the terms they have, and every other music service has failed to break through.

We’re incredibly happy with the structure and the terms that we have.

You don’t need the labels to change their rates for you to be profitable?

No, what we’re doing is we’re investing in growth. As I said earlier, we want to reach every single person on the face of this planet. And that means we’re going to forego profits, to keep investing in growing.

So if you stopped trying to grow now, you’d be profitable?

Yes.

A lot of today’s presentation seemed geared toward artists, some of whom have been vocal about the fact that they don’t think your model works for them. They think you guys make piles of money and they get pennies. How can you fix that?

By doing these kind of things. Telling the story, being honest about how much we’re paying back to rights holders.

But that’s part of the problem — you said you’ve paid $500 million back to rights holders, but most artists see very little of that. It goes to the labels.

I don’t know what kind of deals exist between the artists and the labels, and that’s a part of the controversy.

What is also fair to say is that Spotify is a young service. We’ve only been live in the U.S. for one year. And quite often it takes a year, or 18 months, for many artists to see their first checks from Spotify.

So there’s really this mismatch — people think, “there’s this big service out there called Spotify, and I haven’t gotten paid yet.” But the word is “yet” — not that they’re not going to get paid.

But some have gotten paid, and they’re complaining that the payout is tiny. And then they see that you’re worth $3 billion. Are you always going to have that kind of conflict?

I don’t think so. If we scaled up to a service the size of iTunes, the music industry would be two or three times the size it is today, in terms of revenue. We know that our fundamental model is sound. Now it’s just a perception problem. But more and more people are coming around.

The More Pandora Sells, the More It Loses

Ethan Smith and John Letzing — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 13:30:46 +0000

A tenth of a cent might not sound like a lot of money. But Pandora Media Inc.’s 18 percent stock drop Wednesday is a sobering reminder that those fractions add up — especially when advertising sales don’t keep pace.

Pandora’s music royalty costs, typically paid in tenths of a cent, are skyrocketing. At the same time, the more people who listen to Pandora via mobile devices, such as on smartphones, tablets or through car dashboards, the less advertisers pay to reach those listeners, compared to the ones listening on desktop or laptop computers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Pandora Shares Plunge as It Warns of Losses

Don Clark and Ben Fox Rubin — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:10:27 +0000

Pandora Media Inc. projected slower revenue growth and red ink in the current quarter, triggering a 19 percent plunge in the shares of the Internet radio company.

Joe Kennedy, the company’s chief executive, blamed its disappointing outlook for the fourth fiscal period on a cautious attitude about spending among Pandora’s advertisers, shaped by worries about the impending “fiscal cliff” in Washington and other economic concerns.

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Now It's a Race: ComScore Adds Up Web, Mobile and App Eyeballs for the First Time

Peter Kafka — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 14:42:51 +0000

Big news for Web publishers whose users are increasingly visiting them on their phones: They’re going to start getting credit for those eyeballs, via a new scoring system from comScore.

How much that credit is worth is an open and important question for Web publishers. Because right now most of them have to offer advertisers a very steep discount on mobile eyeballs — as much as 80 percent off of desktop rates.

But addressing that problem will take some time, and at the very least this is an important first step.

And for some sites and services that exist predominantly on mobile sites, the new comScore ratings are going to be a big help. Because they’ll help them justify their pitch — hey, we may not be that big on the Web, but we’re huge on phones — to advertisers.

It’s also a nice reality check for the many app start-ups that are happy to tell you how many downloads they have, but don’t want to talk about how many people use them.

On to the new rankings, which comScore is calling its “Multi Platform” listings. They attempt to track visitors to Web sites, mobile sites and mobile apps, and then combine those tallies without duplicating visits, for a true sense of a publisher’s monthly traffic.

That is: If you visited Facebook on your iPhone app in November, you’ll count as a single unique user; if you also came to the site via your PC in November, Facebook’s unique user count won’t go up.

A few takeaways from the new rankings — you can see a Top 30 list here:

Most of the top players on the Web are still the top players once you add in their mobile audiences. And Google, of course, is still the biggest. But many publishers are now much bigger, and that’s enough to move them up a slot or two. It’s a big deal for Facebook, for instance, to move from No. 4 to No. 3, passing by Microsoft, which used to be No. 2.
The new rankings definitely boost some big players with very big mobile audiences: Note the huge leaps for ESPN and Pandora, with the latter cracking the Top 30 list for the first time. Twitter’s argument that it’s very much a mobile company gets additional credence here, too, since the new rankings bump its total audience up by more than 50 percent.
Note that these rankings are only for the U.S., so it’s possible that some sites would see their scores shoot even higher when you factor in countries where phones are more common than PCs.

And here’s another interesting way to look at the new data — a list of the sites that saw the biggest percentage increase from mobile (click chart to enlarge):

Cooliris, by the way, is a native app on many Android devices, which accounts for the huge spike there. And Zynga’s rise is likely a bit overstated, since most of its real Web traffic gets assigned to Facebook, which is where most of its users encounter the service.

But there are lots of other good nuggets in there. Yesterday, for instance, Groupon’s embattled Andrew Mason said that his company has seen a huge uptake on phones; comScore says he’s right.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Mikhail Pogosov)

You're Launching a Digital Music Start-Up? In 2012? Really?

Peter Kafka — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:30:25 +0000

Question to the people putting money into streaming music start-ups* in 2012: What are you thinking?

Yes, public investors value Pandora at something like $1.4 billion. And private investors think Spotify is worth at least $3 billion. So presumably you’re chasing something like that.

But even those guys are in a precarious position, because they’ve yet to demonstrate that they can afford the cost of music they’re either selling or giving away. And they’re competing with the likes of Apple and Microsoft, which can afford to lose money on this stuff because they think it can help their real businesses.

And you? You definitely can’t afford it, because you have zero scale. So you’re going to burn a ton of money trying to get there.

Quick reminder: Music licensing is crazily complicated in the U.S., and even more so in the rest of the world, since rights deals vary by country. But in general, if you want to get your hands on digital music, you have a few choices:

Pay the music labels and owners stiff fees for “on-demand” rights, like the kind Spotify offers.
Pay them stiff fees via a compulsory license for “Web radio” rights, like the kind Pandora offers.
Or try to avoid some — but not all — of the fees by only working with musicians who don’t have label deals.

The problem with the first two options: You can’t afford them. The problem with the last one: No one** wants to listen to that music.

Don’t want to hear this from me, a mere typer? Can’t blame you there. Conveniently, you can read a more cogent argument from a real pro, published this morning. Here’s the testimony that Venrock’s David Pakman is delivering to Congress today, at a hearing on music licensing reform.

Pakman used to run a digital music company himself and, like nearly every single person who leaves digital music, he has vowed to never go back until the licensing climate changes.

“Although we have met many great entrepreneurs with great product ideas, we have resisted investing in digital music largely for one reason — the complications and conditions of the state of music licensing.”

You want to be the one who proves him wrong? Good luck.

*I can’t believe you’re out there, but I keep hearing from the PR firms you’ve hired, so I guess you are.

**Okay. Some people want to hear it. Maybe the musicians’ friends and family, for instance. And maybe even a few more. But if you want one of those billion-dollar valuations, you want to demonstrate you can get scale. And you’re not going to get it without working with the big guys.

As iTunes Cards Come to "Gifts," Apple and Facebook Meet Under the Mistletoe

Mike Isaac — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 18:00:22 +0000

It looks like Facebook and Apple have been in couples therapy.

Here’s the latest to come of the pair’s improved relationship: You can now purchase iTunes credits for friends on Facebook using Gifts, the social giant’s major social gifting e-commerce initiative.

It works the same as all other purchases made through the Gifts product. Choose an item to send to a friend through Facebook (in this case, the iTunes digital gift), and you’ll pay via your credit card through Facebook. Right now, most of the options Facebook offers are physical goods like food, toys and apparel.

Lately, however, Facebook has geared up on digital gift card offerings. The company unveiled a series of new partnerships at a recent event, including subscriptions to Hulu, Pandora and Rdio. And the marquee partnership Facebook launched Gifts with was the Starbucks deal, which lets users send coffee cards to their friends via the service.

Facebook’s deep push into e-commerce appears right as holiday shopping season kicks off — it’s no coincidence that the iTunes deal is being announced on Cyber Monday — coming just before what is expected to be a banner retail sales season.

It also comes in the wake of a rather ugly season of downturn for shares of Facebook. Investors have questioned the company’s ability to generate sustainable long-term revenue from ads delivered to desktop and mobile users, and as a result, we’ve seen Facebook’s stock price slashed to around half of what it debuted at this summer. Facebook Gifts is a multi-platform initiative across the Web and mobile devices, not strictly beholden to generating revenue primarily from desktop users as is the case for the bulk of Facebook’s existing ad products.

So, does bringing Apple on as a Gifts partner actually amount to building out another meaningful revenue stream?

Perhaps, according to a little back-of-the-envelope math. Per Apple’s last 10-K, the company generated $7.5 billion from the iTunes Store during fiscal year 2012. Industry sources say that more than $2 billion of that revenue comes directly from iTunes gift cards. Sources also tell us that existing retailers who sell iTunes gift cards (like Best Buy, Target and the like) usually keep around 13 percent of each gift-card dollar sold.

So that adds up to around, say, a $260 million market size for physical iTunes cards split among participating retailers, of which Facebook will now be an active participant. That pie is small compared to Facebook’s overall revenue ($3.71 billion in 2011), but another digital product with less overhead and high demand is definitely a win for Facebook’s Gifts department. Not to mention the potential boost Facebook’s massive billion-user distribution could give on iTunes gift-card sales overall.

But the biggest takeaway here isn’t in the numbers; it’s in the fact that this deal even exists at all.

Facebook and Apple have had a long, troubled history of working together, particularly when Steve Jobs was Apple’s CEO. Perhaps the most poignant example came when the two companies failed to come to terms on integrating Ping — Apple’s doomed iTunes-based social network — with the Facebook API, due to what Jobs told us then were “onerous terms” that Facebook set forth.

With Jobs’s passing last year and Tim Cook now at the helm, initiatives like Facebook iOS and OSX integration and today’s iTunes Gifts partnership signal a new era in Facebook-Apple relations — just as Cook suggested would be the case onstage at our D: All Things Digital conference this past spring.

The relationship is no doubt still complicated. But Monday’s announcement is one step closer to peace between the two tech giants — just in time for the holidays.

Just in Time for the Holidays, Facebook Pushes "Gifts" Hard With More Retail Partnerships

Mike Isaac — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 01:52:41 +0000

As I reported earlier that it would, Facebook announced a series of new retail partnerships at an event on Thursday evening, adding brands like the Gap, Fab and Dean & DeLuca to the list of choices from which Facebook users can buy one another using the company’s “Gifts” product. The partnership also adds a number of non-physical gifting options to Facebook’s roster, including subscriptions from Hulu, Rdio and Pandora.

Twitter Confirms Peter Chernin to Join Board of Directors

Mike Isaac — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 01:32:49 +0000

Just like we reported earlier today, Twitter has announced, via a Twitter message, that Peter Chernin, Hollywood mogul and former New York media exec, will join the microblogging service’s board of directors. Chernin has held previous positions at News Corp. (which owns this site), and was key in the formation of the Hulu online TV service. He currently also holds a board seat at Pandora, the streaming music service.

Peter Chernin Rounds Up Another $100 Million, This Time From Qatar

Peter Kafka — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:05:20 +0000

Peter Chernin, the longtime News Corp. executive who is now running his own media and technology fund, has landed another slug of investment money, this time from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

Chernin and Qatar Holding aren’t commenting on financial details, but people familiar with the transaction say the Arab state is putting around $100 million into the Chernin Group. Earlier this year, Chernin struck a separate financing deal with Providence Equity Partners and other backers.

Last month, news reports placed Chernin in talks to combine his firm with Endemol and Core Media Group, two powerful reality-TV producers. Chernin wouldn’t discuss whether the new funding deal would end those talks, or even acknowledge that the conversations existed. “I have no interest in commenting on what’s essentially a rumor,” he says.

Chernin does say he’ll use the new money in the same way he plans to use the money he had already raised — as “firepower” for a strategy he had already laid out: Build up media assets in emerging markets like China, produce film and TV shows in the U.S., and make investment bets on media/tech companies like Tumblr, Flipboard and Pandora.

He says Facebook’s IPO struggles haven’t changed the last part of that thesis. “I think it’s probably made the landscape more attractive, because valuations have gotten more attractive,” he says.

Chernin was News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch’s longtime lieutenant, and left that company in 2009 with a signficant production deal; News Corp. also owns this Web site.

Here’s a highlight reel from a chat I had with Chernin about a year ago, when he appeared at our Asia: D conference in Hong Kong:

[ See post to watch video ]

Apple's iRadio: The Case Against Pandora Panic

Peter Kafka — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:00:11 +0000

Pandora shares fell off a cliff yesterday, after Bloomberg published a story about Apple’s plan to introduce a streaming music service early next year.

Then Pandora bounced back a bit. But it’s still down 12 percent.

Time to buy, says J.P. Morgan’s Doug Anmuth. He figures Pandora is worth $17 a share. It’s currently trading at $8.20.

I’m not terribly interested in stock prices, but I do think Anmuth’s logic is worth following. My translation of his most recent note here:

If the thought of watching Pandora go head to head with Apple freaks you out, then you should have sold two months ago. Bloomberg’s report advances the story, as we news types like to say. But it doesn’t change it: The market knew Apple was headed in this direction back in early September, when The Wall Street Journal first told us about it.

And, as I explained back then, it’s relatively simple for Apple to launch a streaming music service, using whatever model they want. Unlike the TV industry, the music guys are happy to do business with Apple, and are quite amenable to playing around with different business models. Because their existing business is awful.

So, whether Apple’s iRadio, or whatever they’re calling it, launches in January of next year, or March, or whenever, it doesn’t matter. Pandora is likely to face Tim Cook head-on here, and acting surprised about that doesn’t make sense.

Which brings us to the second point …

Apple can launch a Pandora-killer, but Pandora can do just fine, anyway. Apple makes awesome hardware, and does a great job of integrating that hardware with software. But that doesn’t mean it will do a great job of making a streaming music service people will love.

For starters, this is supposed to be an ad-supported service, and selling Internet ads turns out to be a difficult, labor-intensive process — maybe even more so for Internet radio ads, which require lots of face time with local buyers. Pandora has been plodding away at this for years, with some success. But it seems hard to imagine Apple expending the same kind of effort.

And, while Apple revolutionized the digital music business with its iTunes store back in 2003, that doesn’t mean it succeeds at digital services every time it tries.

The obvious examples here are MobileMe and Ping (R.I.P.). But notice that Cook didn’t mention iTunes Match, Apple’s most recent digital music gambit, even once during his last keynote.

Maybe he’s saving that for a future pitch. Or maybe that one didn’t go anywhere.

Finally, remember that while Apple owned the music player market, and it owns the iPad market, it doesn’t own the phone market. So, even if Apple comes out with a killer streaming music service, it’s unlikely that it’s going to make that one available for Android users. Which means Pandora will still have plenty of room to play.

P.S.: By the way? Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy will join us onstage at our D: Dive into Mobile conference in New York next week. Pretty good bet we will talk about this then. We’re sold out, but if you want to get on the wait list, head over here.

Pandora Shares Trip Circuit Breakers After Report of Apple Radio Service

Steven Russolillo — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:05:05 +0000

Look out below.

Pandora Media Inc. shares quickly tumbled after a Bloomberg report surfaces that Apple Inc. is planning its own radio service for an early 2013 launch. The sharp drop for Pandora shares tripped two circuit breakers within a matter of 10 minutes. Circuit breakers are intended to limit violent swings in individual stocks.

Shares recently fell 19 percent to $7.50. The stock is down 25 percent this year, with Thursday’s tumble pushing shares to a fresh record low. The company went public in June 2011 with a $16 IPO price.

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Why NBC Can't Make Money From Its Latest "Saturday Night Live" Viral Video

Peter Kafka — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 13:43:12 +0000

“Saturday Night Live” used to worry that people would watch the sketch show on the Web. Now it embraces the idea.

The show even hired a social media agency to push links and embed codes out early Sunday morning after a new episode airs, so it will get maximum exposure.

But you can be as Web-savvy as you want and still bump into stubborn copyright laws. Which is what appeared to happen this weekend with a sketch that starred Brunos Mars as a Pandora intern.

As far as NBC.com is concerned, the sketch never happened, which means you can’t see it on the network’s site, or on Hulu, either as a clip or as part of the entire episode’s playback.

The very, very obvious culprit here are music licenses, which are almost always the culprit behind missing SNL sketches: In the course of seven minutes, Mars belts out pieces of songs from Katy Perry, Green Day, Aerosmith and Michael Jackson. And if the show doesn’t have the digital rights to a single piece of a single song, the whole thing goes black on the Web, legally speaking.

Still, it’s a sketch about a big, well-known tech brand, and those things always do well on the Internet. So you can still see it all over the Web — including our site — but none of the benefit accrues to NBC or its affiliated sites.

Instead, the winner here is something called GossipCop, which turns out to be part of the Dan “Mediaite” Abrams stable, all of which are very happy to take stuff that runs on TV and replay it over the Web.

But even that is a step forward for NBC, which must surely be aware that Abrams is making money off its clip, but isn’t grousing loudly enough to make him take it down. So, until/unless he does: