US satellite-radio firm SiriusXM has published its latest financial results, and as usual they include figures for music-streaming subsidiary Pandora. It ended March with 55.9 million monthly active listeners, down from 60.9 million a year ago.
Since its peak (81.5 million) in the final quarter of 2014, the service has shed nearly a third of its listeners – a mark of the competition provided by Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming rivals.
On the brighter side, Pandora’s advertising business is growing well: ad revenues were up 29% year-on-year to $312m in the first quarter of this year, even though ad-supported listener hours were down by 8.3% to 2.87bn. Pandora added 113,000 net new self-pay subscribers for its paid tiers during Q1, taking its rounded total to 6.4 million.
In the SiriusXM earnings call, CEO Jennifer Witz noted that “Pandora engagement overall remains a challenge” and later promised that “the losses in the listeners are not where we want to be, and we’re extremely focused on that”, while also pointing to the advertising growth as a positive trend.
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