The Oakland based company is pushing to make its online radio program more widely accessible. It has about 7 million users.
San Francisco — Pandora Media Inc., the popular music site that recently unveiled an updated website, has teamed up with Sprint Nextel to deliver personalized streaming radio to its mobile phone users.
Pandora, the third-largest free Internet-based radio service, having nearly 7 million registered users, according to founder Tim Westergren, lets people create stations based on their favorite artists and other songs it finds that match in style.
While the service is free for the first 30 days, it will cost $2.99 per month after the free 30-day trial period is over on select Sprint phones. The service will work initially on five phone models but will expand to all high-speed data phones sold by Sprint by the end of June, the company said.
The music service has attracted 6.9 million users ever since it was launched in November 2005 and was recently banned, along with a dozen other popular media Web sites, such as YouTube and MySpace, from the Defense Department’s computer system because of network bandwidth concerns.
Pandora has spent several years analyzing songs based on such characteristics as the vocalist’s tone and range. It then tries to predict new music choices by taking the user’s song preferences and finding matches in its database. Users can give the song a thumb’s up or down, creating a personal playlist.
While only Sprint is carrying the music service right now, Pandora says it would like to offer its services on other carriers eventually. The company did not specify, however, who it was discussing offering the service through.
"We knew that if we wanted to be radio with a capital ‘R,’ we have to be everywhere, and not just on the Internet,” said Westergren. “We knew we had to make it mobile."
The company made the announcement at an event Tuesday night for its fans at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Its executives took a cue from Apple CEO Steve Jobs as they made their presentation, even borrowing Jobs’ popular tease, "one more thing."
Pandora is expanding to other devices as well. The company previewed a wireless MP3 player that could also stream music from Pandora, but said it is an early prototype and that it will make more sense when wireless Internet access becomes more widespread.
It also struck a deal with digital-media player maker Sonos Inc.’s home digital music system to stream music into the home wirelessly for $36 a month.
Pandora, however, faces a potentially life-threatening expense of music royalty fees that a panel of copyright judges recently approved for Internet radio providers. Westergren said: "We write a big licensing check every month; it’s expensive and takes a lot of advertising." The new royalty rates are set to kick in July 15 but are being contested by a coalition of companies, including Pandora, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
"If those rates do not change, business does not make sense for us anymore," Westergren said.