Speaking on a Pandora conference call, Pandora CFO Mike Herring said:
Apple has a unique advantage of being on hundreds of millions of phones and having 800 million credit cards or whatever they do and stuff. But if they didn’t have that, they would have to – and they spend a lot of their real estate on this phone trying to drive people to music. You can’t even get it off – it’s like a permanent thing on there and still no one subscribes.
And:
I mean Steve Jobs eviscerated the music industry with the launch of iTunes and it’s been downhill ever since. And the download was supposed to save it, that didn’t happen.
You can read a transcript of the call here [Free REG-WALL].
Several days later, Mike posted this tweet:
Offering sincere apologies for my recent careless and inappropriate comments about Apple and Steve Jobs.
One could argue that Pandora would not exist if it were not for Steve Jobs and iTunes. At least he walked it back.
iTunes ecvvicerated the music business. Not that the music business didn’t deserve it.
Once consumers got used tabuing songs for 99¢, the value of music declined in the consumer mind. Streaming was the natural evolution to the practice. On monthly fee for an entire library of music makes all music worth the same amount of money.
They did it to software too. The App Store has turned app development into a race to the bottom.
Jim Dalrymple and this guy should get together and do a podcast. They can call it “Duncecap Discourses.”
Mic drop.
And yet you still come here? Hmmmmm.
Apple Music and Spotify are miles ahead of Pandora, so if you can’t beat ’em, bash ’em. It’s pretty obvious he’s just bitter because Pandora needs Apple but Apple doesn’t need Pandora.
I mean Steve Jobs eviscerated the music industry with the launch of iTunes and it’s been downhill ever since.
Yeah, the industry, which as Jim says, deserved it.
To the best of my knowledge, the musicians can easily get the better deal now, by independently releasing on iTunes and capturing pretty much all of that 70% of sales.
The labels mostly deserve the deaths they can’t avoid.
Which is why nobody writes good software anymore!
Naw; most people already weren’t gonna buy anything expensive.
(I mean, people on the internet keep talking about BBEdit leaving, and so on.
Guys – you were the only ones who bought BBEdit anyway; it’s a developer tool, not a general-purpose every-user tool.
Every time I see Gruber or Dalrymple or Ament talk about that kind of thing, it’s some beloved developer tool – and developer tools were never central to a vibrant platform in that way.
[They’re central in that they need to exist to make good stuff but not central in that users of the platform need to even know what they’re called or ever see them.]
Of course the “most popular” applications in a store for “every user” will be stupid games and the sorts of utilities that “random people” like [diet and time management, but not the crazy-hardcore to-do-as-religion sort].
I can’t help but feel that a lot of the “App Store sucks” viewpoint – if not from Jim, above necessarily, then from the Mac Internet Cognoscenti – comes from “this isn’t the software we get excited about.
But the software the MICs get excited about was never gonna be the star.)
(And I say all this about dev tools as a professional software developer – though not a Mac one* – who’s used BBEdit and the like in the past.
Pandora, you pay some of the lowest rates in the industry to musicians, and you do this because you believe in the music industry?
No, you line your pockets with profit instead. The gravy, has, is, and always will be in song ownership, not ‘all you can eat’ streaming.
I like Pandora and I pay for it, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s just another parasite on the backs of artists. I’d be in favor of Apple replacing ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC if they kick back more to the artist.
One could also argue that streaming music would not exist without Pandora. Herring wasn’t wrong in his sentiment that if Apple Music weren’t installed on every iPhone device by default, it wouldn’t have had anywhere nearly the success that it has. It’s just not good enough to win on it’s on merit.
Damage seems done, regardless. Not sure he CAN walk it back.
How so? For what each does, Pandora is (in my opinion) far better than Apple Music. Of course, Pandora is not providing the same service as Apple Music (yet) so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison (no pun intended), but Apple Music is such a poor user experience whereas Pandora is pretty smooth sailing. Again, for what each is intended to do, I think Pandora is well ahead of Apple.
pandora has not turned a profit in its 10 years of existence.
It was remembering the history of CD prices that particularly made me laugh at Herring’s use of “eviscerated.”
The only rational comment here so far.
the fact that he said it out loud says a lot about how little he knows about the industry his company’s in.
Publicity hunt 101:
1. bash Apple
2. apologize
3. Wait for traffic jump and new customers
bonus: do it in Holiday Season.
That’s all I see in that news.
I’ll go ahead and say it as a former and likely future Mac developer currently using iOS.
As a user, I greatly prefer Mac App Store apps.
He spoke about the dead Steve Jobs badly! This is why he walked it back!
What killed the Music Industry was Autotune! Now only “beautiful young” dancers on stage at singing talents need not apply! That is why more and more people only want signals that Music Industry killed once CDs came along!
Doesn’t mean Pandora’s executives are not getting big paychecks.
Pandora can kiss my ass. I am an artist with 3 albums out there, and whenever I get a check the vast majority of $ is coming from two places – sales in Apple iTunes, and licensing from Rumblefish. Spotify, Rhapsody, Pandora, they all pay virtually nothing. For every $100, I’d say sales and licensing account for about $96 of it.
careless and inappropriate comments
But not apologising for being wrong, because no one can apparently be wrong any more. That would hurt people’s feels.
You hit it on the head – Pandora can’t even compete with half of Apple Music’s capabilities. Streaming services today – Spotify, Beats Audio and now Apple Music, etc. – offer “radio” and custom streaming. Until Pandora offers actual streaming of custom playlists or albums/artists/etc., it won’t be able to compete with the likes of Apple Music and Spotify.
For Dave and Shawn, absolutely.