Streaming music has become the go-to source for millions of listeners across the globe, so it wasn’t that big of a surprise that Apple would jump into the game, too. Apple Music is the company’s attempt to steal some of the attention.
Of course, Apple Music is, for all intents and purposes, late to the game. There are several companies that are already entrenched within the market, including Spotify, Rdio, even Xbox Music (which will be known as Groove soon enough). But, another name, Pandora, has been in the game even longer, and it’s built up its name within the market as one of the go-to sources for listening to music.
Pandora is a radio station, though, and while users can customize their stations around artists and songs that they like, to eventually put together a radio station that’s cultivated by their own tastes and algorithms behind-the-scenes picking the next track, it’s a different beast than Apple Music proper. Apple has its own radio-like efforts, though, with human-curated playlists that expand and learn from the user inputting their “likes” on the songs and artists they enjoy listening to.Apple Music has Beats 1, too, a global radio station, but while users can input requests to Beats 1 at certain times, it’s very much like a proper radio station, and the listener has little-to-no impact on its content.
Apple Music was meant to be a big hit to the music streaming market, and for obvious reasons the aforementioned companies, despite already having market presence and millions of listeners in most cases, were keeping an eye on it leading up to its debut on June 30, along with iOS 8.4. Unfortunately for Apple, it turns out that Apple Music hasn’t had that big of an impact just yet.
According to the CEO of Pandora, Brian McAndrews, Pandora has seen “no impact” ever since the launch of Apple Music. While the company lost $16.1 million during the June quarter, the custom radio outlet generated revenue upwards of $285.6 million, with advertising growing 30 percent year-over-year. Essentially, Pandora is still going strong, and while McAndrews is aware that some users might try out Apple Music, making a short-term impact possible, he doesn’t see any worry for a real long-term change.
“In terms of Apple Music, of course it launched at the end of June, so there was no impact yet,” he said. “Going forward, we feel really good about our trajectory and competitive position. With any big launch like this and the noise in the marketplace, there could be some users that experiment with it and there could be some short term impact… But we don’t believe that there will be any long-term impact.“
Considering it’s only the end of July, an immediate impact on Pandora might not be visible, with Apple Music only launching at the end of June. It will be interesting to see how Apple’s music streaming service is doing in the months ahead, which could only really be revealed to us through the announcements made by other companies sometime down the line.
Are you still using Apple Music?
[via Business Insider]
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