US satellite radio firm SiriusXM published its Q4 financials yesterday, revealing that its revenues for 2021 as a whole grew by 8% to $8.7bn.
Within this, there were individual figures for the SiriusXM radio service as well as the Pandora streaming service. The former added just under 1.2 million net new self-pay subscribers last year, taking its total to 32 million – a record for the company. It also had 6.8 million people in trial subscriptions at the end of the year.
Pandora? Its listener numbers are still declining: down from 58.9 million in 2020 to 52.3 million in 2021. Pandora added around 45,000 paying subscribers that year to take its subs total to 6.3 million, while its advertising revenues grew by 30% to $1.54bn. So, Pandora is doing a very good job at making money from ads, but still hasn’t managed to turn its listener decline around.
“The mix is shifting to more loyal customers, which have longer listening hours,” SiriusXM CEO Jennifer Wirtz told analysts, while admitting that “advertising growth will clearly become more challenged”.
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