An Open Letter to the Board Of Directors of Pandora Music
TAMPA, FL - 06/27/2017 (PRESS RELEASE JET)
An Open Letter to the Board Of Directors of Pandora Music and the incoming CEO:
Dear Pandora Music;
I want to start off by thanking you for the contributions that Pandora has had in helping the music industry embrace on-demand listening and ultimately, streaming. Companies like Pandora, Spotify, and others have helped bring pirated music to its knees. Companies like Pandora always get trashed for not magically finding more money to pay artists (artists are still learning about the long game here). This open letter to the Board of Directors and the incoming CEO is some advice to help a new era Music company right the ship.
One of the reasons that your stock has been in decline is because your company has been incredibly slow to embrace on-demand streaming. You thought that the consumer wanted to listen to radio and not pick and choose what songs they wanted to hear. It was almost a half a decade into Spotify's reign that you guys decided to act, the delay resulted in Pandora’s steady decline.
Another reason is that you're more concerned with keeping emerging artists out than to add them to your library of content and have millions of artists promoting Pandora to their fan base. You would rather play streaming cop and pick and choose who you would want to add to your service. In the mean-time every other streaming service allows for emerging artists to have their music available for streaming and downloads. I just received an email last week from a music distributor that distributes over 10,000 songs and Pandora made a sweeping decision to not add any of the titles based on "quality of music". If Pandora would stop sucking up to the popular artists and record labels and allow everyone in, you might be getting more traffic and subscriptions to your service! As long as you want to keep artists out or have them jump through all sorts of hoops to simply submit a song, you will continue to be irrelevant in the music streaming service.
For over two decades now, I have devoted my life to helping artists from all walks of life. From artists that are signed to major record deals to artists that you won’t allow on Pandora because of “sound quality issues.” I’m rooting for Pandora to dominate. The more services out there, the better it is for artists.
I want to challenge the Board of Directors (especially the four new board members that will be appointed by the Sirius XM investment) and the incoming CEO. Do not continue to make the same mistakes that has caused your stock to go from $34 a share to $9 so quickly. Instead, embrace the emerging artist, make it easy for them to get their music on your service, give all artists a place to promote (like spotify has done), stop acting like the cool kid in the room and playing music cop and let the music be heard! You bought rdio and didn't bring over any of the good things that rdio had to offer (play count, extensive catalog, promotional tools), you're losing and will continue to lose until you realize that in order to beat a Spotify you must first be able to match their catalog and right now indie records shop in SoHo have a bigger catalog than Pandora.
Thanks for reading my open letter and I look forward to hearing that you have opened your service to all artists and not just the ones that you think are fitting for your company.
Let the music be heard!
Matthew Rix
Matthew Rix is a 20 year veteran in the music industry, his daily music business audio series the "Mattrix Minute" has had over 8 million sales and streams. This fall Rix is heading to 4 different continents to host “Breakthrough (A Music Business Event)” in cities around the world.
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