Pandora Unveils Promotional Tools for Artists, Labels
October 17 2016 - 6:10AM
Dow Jones News
When R&B singer Jill Scott started promoting the third
single from her 2015 album earlier this year, Pandora Media Inc.
let her put the song, "Can't Wait," into heavier-than-normal
rotation on its internet radio service. But her fans didn't seem to
like it, with only 40% giving it a thumbs-up.
The problem, according to Bryan Calhoun, the digital strategist
for her management firm: "People weren't familiar with it."
But after Ms. Scott inserted an audio message to introduce the
song in which she said, "I hope you love this song as much as I
loved making it," 70% of fans started thumbing up the track, in
turn prompting Pandora's system to play the song for a wider swath
of listeners.
After letting some artists test such messages and similar
marketing tools over the past few years, Pandora is now making a
new tool kit available to any artist or label that could help solve
one of the biggest conundrums of releasing music in the digital
age: fans tend to prefer music they've heard before, and online
services make it easier than ever to skip the unfamiliar. FM radio
stations have long established familiarity by repeatedly bombarding
listeners with a small number of songs. But digital services that
allow users to choose, skip or thumb up and down their music don't
offer the same ability to create hits.
Now, though, artists and labels who use Pandora's two-year-old
"Amp" platform can record audio messages on their smartphones
asking their fans to give new songs a chance, while instructing the
service to play a certain song more often for a given period. The
automated system also prompts artists to take these and other
actions based on how listeners are responding to their music.
"Data is only useful if it's actionable," said Sara Clemens,
Pandora's chief operating officer.
The new promotional tools are rolling out on the heels of
Pandora's first direct-licensing deals with the major record labels
in its nearly 17-year history. Pandora struck the deals in order to
launch an on-demand, $10-a-month subscription offering—due out by
year's end—that would compete with services such as Spotify AB,
Apple Inc.'s Apple Music and the new Amazon Music Unlimited. Until
this year, Pandora's relations with the major labels had been
chilly as it used government-mandated licenses to play its 2
million-track catalog at federally set rates for its nearly 80
million free listeners. The listeners can create custom "stations"
based on a song, artist, mood or genre but can't control which
songs they hear.
Faced with stagnating listener growth in the countries where it
operates—the U.S., Australia and New Zealand—the company this past
summer opted to join with the big record companies in order to
expand its offerings, launching an enhanced ad-free tier called
"Pandora Plus" last month while eyeing international expansion down
the road. Pandora's executives are hoping that the more
aggressively artists and their labels use Pandora as a marketing
tool, the more fans will engage with the service as well.
"It's a two-sided marketplace," said Pandora Chief Executive Tim
Westergren in an interview earlier this year.
While Spotify and Apple Music also allow acts to post messages
for their fans, artists can potentially reach a much bigger U.S.
audience through Pandora, which has about four times the number of
users than the 18.3 million paying music subscribers in the U.S. as
of the first half of this year.
Pandora can also help artists plan and promote concerts at
venues that have contracts with Ticketfly, the ticketing company
that Pandora acquired last year. Artists can route tours through
areas where their listeners are concentrated, and then announce the
shows and sell tickets directly to those listeners through the
platform.
Ticketfly, though, is still tiny compared with Live Nation
Entertainment Inc.'s Ticketmaster, and artists playing
Ticketmaster-contracted venues can't sell tickets directly through
Pandora's site.
Having pushed out more than 5,400 audio messages to date,
Pandora's Ms. Clemens said an average of 5% of the listeners who
have heard messages announcing tour presales have clicked through
to potentially buy tickets, while Pandora is regularly selling 10%
to 30% of the inventory on tours that it promotes and tickets.
About 55,000—or 10%—of the tickets to the Rolling Stones' 2015
"Zipcode" tour were purchased through Pandora in 24 hours, she
said. A representative for the Rolling Stones declined to
comment.
Giving labels more influence over which songs get pushed to
listeners is a shift for Pandora, which has attracted many fans
because of its algorithm that surfaces music based on the company's
rigorous analysis of the musical properties of each song, along
with every user's feedback to each tune. But Pandora said the songs
being promoted will be clearly marked as "featured" and will be
taken out of heavy rotation if enough listeners thumb them down. A
spokeswoman said the company hadn't received any negative feedback
about tracks it has promoted while testing the program so far.
Write to Hannah Karp at hannah.karp@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 17, 2016 06:55 ET (10:55 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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