Max Engel: a Blog

Pandora’s Biggest Weakness, Potential Opportunity

teamsidewinder:

From a discovery standpoint, Pandora is built upon the concept of reinforcing existing taste and presenting a variation on a theme. In practice, this means that a listener is exposed to music they’ll like, but not necessarily new music. Pandora could add a means by which it scans a users music library to determine existing artists already in their collection. Then, truly “new” discovery could occur, and a listener could stumble across new bands and purchase new music.

Additionally, Pandora is inherently a passive music experience, and so there is little engagement with the product outside of the minimal amount of interaction necessary when listening to a station. While they’ve dabbled with social elements through the website, it would be interesting for them to focus on other threads of music discovery. For example, Bandsintown lets me link my taste profile to Pandora to help me explore local concerts. I think Pandora should more deeply explore ways to bridge offline and online music experiences.

Finally, Pandora should explore the ways in which they could act as an intermediary platform to connect labels and artists with listeners. For example, Pandora is sitting on a trove of valuable analytics that get generated as a byproduct of user interaction. This data could be immensely valuable if packaged correctly, and the music industry would be willing to pay for access to a service that would help them better understand their consumers. Similarly, there has been a great deal of activity in the direct-to-consumer music marketing space, and Pandora could also explore how they could offer better services in this area to allow a band to better engage with their fans.

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I’m participating in a virtual roundtable series on sidewinder.fm about Pandora. Here is my response to the first question.