Rumor: Spotify To Launch Pandora Competitor By End Of 2012
by Brent Dirks
April 26, 2012
Great news, everyone. It looks like Spotify will soon be announcing … a Pandora competitor.
According to Bloomberg, the streaming giant is developing an Internet radio service to take on the reining king in Pandora:
The new service would start by year-end and be supported by advertising, said the people, who weren't authorized to talk publicly. The company has begun notifying some content partners of its plans, they said. "We have no announcements to share at this time," Graham James, a spokesman for Spotify in New York, said in an interview. He declined to comment further.The main driver behind the effort would be to attract users to free services that can eventually be converted over to paid subscribers. There would also be another plus to the radio service. While Spotify users have been suffering from a lack of music by popular artists like The Beatles and Adele, the radio service would play by a different set of rules:
While Pandora users can't choose specific songs, they have access to any artist whose music has been published, because the service operates under federal rules. Royalties paid by Pandora and other online radio companies are set by the Copyright Royalty Board, a division of the Library of Congress.The current Spotify desktop client does feature artist radio. But compared to Pandora, it is severely lacking. Would you be interested in Pandora-like radio from Spotify? Personally, I'd like to see the company continue to focus on improving current features for paying subscribers as well. The chance to hear new music would be a plus, but so would an official (or unofficial) iPad app.
