The Faults In Their Apps

Again, revisiting some topics from last year in this entry. (I promise, the blog will cover new ground going forward). Since May 2016, Pandora appears to have done very little to expand its first foray into podcast distribution (when it picked up NPR’s “This American Life” and “Serial” programs).

It’s surprising but not so surprising at the same time. Pandora has been thoroughly eclipsed by its competitors such as Spotify, even in its main reason for being – streaming music. If anything, in the year and a half since Pandora dipped its toe into podcasts in this manner, the script has flipped – Pandora has become the small fish, not even an equal to podcasting as a media force.

The previous leadership of Pandora recently departed, and apparently did not take the podcasting distribution initiative much further. The new CEO, Roger Lynch (see Variety’s coverage), comes from the satellite TV industry. While Lynch pledges in this story that he will re-commit Pandora to non-music programming, one wonders if that would be at odds with its newer backer, SiriusXM, which invested $480 million in the company after forcing out Tim Westergren, Pandora’s founder and previous CEO, in June 2017.

SiriusXM, as mentioned in the previous blog entry here, is now experimenting with social media sharing of audio, non-music programming, with its new Spoke app. Pairing an interest in Pandora with Spoke illuminates SiriusXM’s pursuit of a new strategy of mixing free content with samples of content that is normally behind paywalls.

The clarity of this strategy is suspect, however. Arbitrarily distributing some content for free and some for subscription fees, without carefully curating the content or assessing its value, seems too scattershot – like SiriusXM, overall, with Pandora and Spoke, is throwing different business model approaches at audiences to see what sticks or what works.

Editor’s Note: As an aside, the Spoke app I raved about in the previous entry does have some glitches, I’ve since discovered. The audio player can tend to pause repeatedly on its own, making it frustrating to get through clips that are only three to five minutes in all. The feature that lets one flag clips is useless because there doesn’t appear to be any place in the app that then compiles whatever clips are flagged to browse later.

Podcast of the moment:

The Carson Podcast, June 22, 2017. Host Mark Malkoff, who devotes his show to all things Johnny Carson related, speaks with legendary TV director Hal Gurnee, who had worked with both Jack Paar and David Letterman, about his experiences shaping late night legends. The interview is both a window into old show business and a source of insight about Letterman’s innovation of the late-night talk show format.