Pandora recently announced that it has passed 200 Million Users on its streaming music platform.  This reportedly includes over 100,000 artists that compile the Pandora catalog of music.  

Pandora which went public back in June 2011.  Its stock has fluctuated after an inflated IPO.  However, the recent news made public by the SEC, shows that its founders are cashing out as if they were dependent on streaming revenue to pay their bills (sarcasm intended).  The SEC Form 4 report show that Pandora’s top brass has cashed out approximately $87.6 million dollars of their own stock all within less than 2 years of going public.  

So what does this mean?  Well, it means several things: 1. the executives are now rich (assuming they weren’t before they sold their own Pandora stock), 2. the stock will likely slide in value as the market watches the top executives’ behavior as an indication of the health of a company, 3. the streaming music model is not working well.

Point 3 should be the most alarming and obvious to artists.  We’ve reported numerous times of the apparent inadequacies of streaming revenues (e.g. 1,000,000 streams equal some insanely low amount of money).  With this new information it is clear that the streaming financial model in place with Pandora, while inadequate for most artists seems to be inadequate for Pandora itself.  It appears that the royalty rates that Pandora agreed to pay the labels set the bar at too high of a rate to be a sustainable or scalable model. 

For the artists out there, how much have you seen in terms of streaming revenue to date?  Are you sound exchange numbers increasing in a proportional manner?  Curious minds want to know. 

Please write in with your comments.  Stay tuned for more.