"It's an interesting thing to consider," Westergren tells Fast Company. "The wild card here is music licensing." But legalities aside, his openness to collaboration speaks volumes about the future of music streaming services.
Asked about Echo Nest, the "musical brain" that powers personalized music discovery on myriad digital platforms, Pandora cofounder Tim Westergren yawns.
"Each new entrant into Internet radio is to me further validation that this is where the future is," he says. "To the extent that Spotify launches radio, yes, that competes with us. But we've never lacked for competition: When we started, AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft all had huge online radio audiences. It's not new to us."
Though a wide range of critics view Echo Nest as serious competition to Pandora's service and recommendation algorithm--it's already powering Spotify Radio, for example--Westergren isn't fazed. Pandora has 100 million registered users. The average user listens to Pandora for more than 18 hours a month--compared to the average user on Google and Facebook, who spends just two and eight hours on the services each month, respectively. That's partly why Westergren is so confident in Pandora's future, even as more and more on-demand subscription services--like Spotify, MOG, and Rdio--begin to crowd the digital music space and overlap its market. But Westergren doesn't see these on-demand services as competition. He sees them as complementary services and even potential partners. "[We] live happily alongside on-demand options," he says. "Every year we've had subscription services around us, but there's no evidence since we've launched that these two different modes compete."
Take Spotify. The Swedish-founded startup, which boasts 2.5 million subscribers, recently unveiled an app platform with launch partners that include Last.fm and Songkick. Would Pandora ever become an app on Spotify? "Yeah, it's an interesting thing to consider," Westergren says. "The wild card here is music...
[Source: Fast Company]
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