I pay for Pandora b/c I get to listen to radio without ads and talk show hosts. I don't want to worry about what songs to play. Select a station and go.<p>"Pandora to post $1.2 billion in revenue for the year, an increase of 27 percent from 2014, the company’s slowest annual growth ever." ... It's cases like this where I wish it wasn't a public company and instead was run by someone who wanted to keep making the best music streaming app/website in town.
It would be great if Netflix bought pandora, I can see Netflix doing really great things with the underlying tech and expanding on the general idea and service of pandora. Also the pandora recommendation engine could be leveraged to provide improved Netflix recommendations.
It would be so depressing if Pandora's incredible music trait database went down the acquisition drain. I would pay good money for a service that let me search for songs by sets of traits. ("Give me some songs in minor, with technically impressive solos, with haunting female vocals, without any drums.")
I think it would be interesting to have google buy it. Pandora's strength seems to come from their massive dataset of song traits. Google could probably make good use of that data. They'd probably feed it into a neural net and see if they can teach a machine to detect those traits, if they haven't already.
Is there a venture backed company that hasn't had this kind of conversation?<p>I don't see how you could raise money without having this kind of conversation.