US satellite-radio firm SiriusXM published its latest financials yesterday, revealing that it now has nearly 30.5 million ‘self-pay’ subscribers to its service, having added 169,000 in the third quarter of this year. Its revenue grew by 1% year-on-year to $1.6bn.
Its music streaming subsidiary Pandora is still battling to turn around its listener decline though. Pandora ended Q3 with 58.6 million monthly active listeners, down from 59.6 million in Q2, and 63.1 million a year ago.
Pandora added around 105,000 self-pay subscribers for its premium tiers, meaning it has nearly 6.4 million – compared to nearly 6.3 million a year ago.
“We still continue to battle the declining listener base in our Pandora listener base,” said CEO Jim Meyer in Sirius XM’s earnings call. “With that said, it is still by far the largest listener base in the US market. And we’re working really hard, really hard on that problem.”
President and chief content officer Scott Greenstein also stoked anticipation for how SiriusXM and Pandora’s partnership with Drake will work, when his next album comes out.
“Not only a unique channel, which will certainly have his imprint on it, but there’ll be things that Pandora in the playlist category and some other things that I think will surprise people with some of the technology Pandora’s been working on…”
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