Boston, MA 10/28/2013 (wallstreetpr) – An epic battle for the internet radio service business is shaping up between Pandora Media Inc (NYSE:P) and rival Apple Inc. The battle started last month and each side has issued what they call impressive figures. So is Pandora losing it already? Not really, in fact, it seems Apple has a lot of homework to do if its intent is to have Pandora trailing it in this market segment.
The best illustration of Pandora’s position against Apple Inc. can be seen in the recent release by Apple Inc at the announcement of its iPad Air device and what Pandora also released almost the same time. The tech giant Apple Inc. declared that for the five weeks of its iTunes Radio existence, 20 million people have streamed more than one billion songs through the platform. Considering the number of unique listeners that iTunes Radio attracted in its first week of launch of about 11 million, the freshly announced figure of 20 million people doesn’t look quite a significant growth in its listener-base. It essentially means its attraction in the four weeks following the launch kind of dropped.
Now, if the billion songs reported by Apple Inc on its iTunes Radio platform is divided by 20 million which is the number of people it says listened to the songs, what comes out is that more than 50 tunes per person for the five weeks duration. This is actually no mean achievement; the figure validates the fact that people are really using the service. So where does this leave Pandora? In the last month, from the time which iTunes Radio launched, Pandora reported serving its 72.7 million active listeners with 1.36 billion hours.
Considering that an average song runs for roughly four minutes, it means Apple Inc served 4 billion minutes for the five week period while Pandora served 81.6 minutes for almost the same duration. This translates into Pandora serving nearly 40 times what Apple served through iTunes Radio. This actually means that regardless of the seemingly huge numbers coming from Apple Inc., Pandora still leads with a comfortable margin.
In the Friday’s trading, Pandora gained 1.05% to close north at $26.96.
