Pandora is an internet radio station that offers automated music recommendation. You can type in a song or artist that you like and Pandora will generate a continuous playlist for you. During a song, you can click whether or not you like it. If you like that song, Pandora will play more songs that are similar in style. If you do not like that song, then Pandora will not pick that type of songs. It was brilliant. Everybody at my work listened to Pandora. You can also listen to Pandora on your smartphone. Pandora relies on ads and the ad-free subscriptions for its revenue.
The downside? You can only skip a certain number of songs per hour and playback is not allowed. The most important downside of Pandora is that it only available in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. I missed Pandora a lot when I moved away and Pandora was no longer available. But then, along came Spotify.
Spotify is a commercial music streaming service. You can download the player and listen to the music on your computer, tablet and smartphone and it is free, or, at least, in the Netherlands. On Spotify, you can search for your favorite songs and artists and listen to the whole album or create your own playlist. The coolest thing is that it also offers the exact same service as Pandora, except on Spotify you can do much more. Since I have Spotify, I stop using iTunes on my computer. The annoying thing about Spotify is that if you use the free version, you have audio ads and the visual ads on the player but you can pay a premium package to have the ad-free version. Spotify is available in Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and a few countries in Asia and South America. It also looks like Spotify plans to expand its service to many more countries.
Looking at Pandora, it is such a shame that the company does not want to make it service available to the whole world. The Pandora concept was so new and had large potential. Now it might be too late for Pandora to take on the world. The Pandora’s box might be permanently closed after all.
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Consumer Value Creation 