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Pandora’s Cakebread Speaks
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Tim Westergren,
Pandora’s founder, is the public face of the Internet music service. However,
recently, Steve Cakebread, Pandora’s chief financial officer, spoke with Rocco
Pendola, a contributor to Seeking Alpha, an Internet financial information
site.
He provided some
interesting numbers to what for many is a new and seemingly opaque business.
Topic one was the
worry many had that Internet music providers such as Pandora would be hamstrung
by data usage limitations (caps) on mobile devices.
Cakebread dismissed
those concerns by providing usage numbers and noting that Pandora uses an
efficient transmission codec, AAC+, rather than the data-heavy MP3. Pendola
quoted Cakebread that an hour of listening to Pandora consumed a mere 14 MB
therefore one would have to listen to almost 150 hours per month, exclusively
on a mobile device, to approach the standard 2 GB per month cap. Pandora’s
listenership numbers indicated that the typical listener listened less than 20
hours a month.
Pendola also
inquired about whether in the long run performance royalty costs wouldn’t eat
away at Pandora’s profitability, how Pandora was getting into the coveted
automobile dashboard and asked about the extent of insider share sales.
The article is here.
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