Sweet Pandora
Pandora launched a new subscription-based premium service called Pandora One, which delivers better quality for $36 a year. Pandora One streams at 192K bits per second, allows unlimited song skips, enables five hours of non-interaction without timeout, and offers several different user interfaces to suit most preferences. Anyone who subscribed before, which simply let them avoid ads, gets a free upgrade to Pandora One.
It wasn’t that long ago that Pandora was struggling to survive. But now revenue may double this year to $40 million, thanks to sales of targeted advertising and the huge jump in users thanks to iPhone and BlackBerry apps.
(Title lyric from Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joey Kramer.)
