 |
| Brian McAndrews |
Pandora Media Inc. has turned to digital-advertising veteran
Brian McAndrews as its new chief executive officer, in a push to lift revenue
while fending off competition from Apple Inc.
According to Bloomberg, McAndrews was also named chairman and
president, succeeding Joe Kennedy, according to a statement Wednesday from
Oakland, California-based Pandora.
The 54-year-old McAndrews led digital marketing firm
aQuantive Inc., which was sold to Microsoft Corp. for about $6 billion.
With McAndrews, Pandora aims to bolster advertising, which
accounted for 88 percent of its $427 million in revenue last fiscal year. While
the company dominates Web radio, ad sales haven’t kept up with growth in
listeners or royalty expenses, leading to losses totaling $50.9 million in the
past three quarters.
This month’s entry of ITunes Radio from Apple, already the
largest online music seller, will add to the pressure on Pandora.
Pandora’s 72.1 million users listened to 1.35 billion hours
of programming in August, an increase of 16 percent from a year earlier,
according to a Sept. 5 statement. The company’s share of total U.S.
radio listening rose to 7.5 percent.
Even so, reports Bloomberg, its revenue amounts to a smaller fraction of the
annual $15 billion local-radio advertising market.
“A big part of Pandora’s future will be its ability to
disrupt traditional radio advertising and its ability to lure those ad dollars,”
said Brian Nowak, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group, said in an
interview with Bloomberg.
No comments:
Post a Comment