Bring Natural Overlapped Music-Flow To Pandora® Streaming Platforms And Applications

Gain a distinctive competitive advantage

Pandora Faces Challenging Competition

As of mid 2018, Pandora® Media is the third-ranked U.S. streaming music service.  Founded in 2000, it serves the United States, New Zealand and Australia. Market share rankings and revenue figures are continually changing but, in 2018, Pandora had approximately 78 million active users.  And about 5% of those users are paid subscribers.  The rest are free riders.  And they are allowed to listen free in return for accepting advertiser messages.

Doing the math, 5% of 78 million means that Pandora® might have at least 3.9 million paid users.  That’s handy.  But competitor Spotify® claims 20 million paid users.  And the other services, including deep pocket players like Google® and Apple®, are growing their paid users every month—at Pandora’s expense.  For Pandora, that’s painful.

The Objective Is Clear

In a July 21, 2016 statement to shareholders, Pandora Founder and CEO Tim Westergren asserted:

 “Pandora plans to deliver a powerfully differentiated music experience to accelerate growth and deliver value to listeners, music makers, advertisers and ultimately shareholders.”

Pandora’s best minds are surely working on his promise.  But the most talented technical people and aggressive product managers at Pandora’s competition are ALSO doing everything they can to make their listener experience more appealing too.  Heads up Pandora: My company, Codentity LLC, can help accelerate your progress---today.

Claiming Leadership In The Listener Experience Metric

Music applications designed for Web-music players and their desktop-counterpart streaming apps generally suffer from one or two unpleasant song-to-song mixing effects:  undesirable SILENCE GAPS or sloppy CROSS FADES.

By contrast, patented (U.S. 9,286,942) Codentity Transition Technology (CTT), if licensed and adapted for streaming networks or applications, could eliminate SILENCE GAPS, and also nullify the necessity for methodology that simulates imprecise and sloppy CROSS FADE transitions (example: Spotify's 'Cross Fade Tracks' option).   With CTT adapted to execute automatic mixing mode functions, the Web-streamed music-flow experience can be transformed from persistent SILENCE GAP effects and sloppy CROSS FADE style events—to uniformly smooth and naturally-overlapped song-to-song transitions (which is the way the LISTENER expects to hear their favorite music).

How Pandora Benefits

Removing the 5 to 10 second SILENCE GAPS between streamed songs would provide several benefits:

• Without silence gaps, Pandora would recover approximately 115 seconds of time each hour to use as potential commercial inventory.  More inventory for their already effective ad sales team would surely translate into greater ad sales revenues.

• Without silence gaps, Pandora immediately sounds better when compared to formidable competitor Spotify—which features two streaming modes:  SILENCE GAPS or the CROSS FADE tracks option; and Spotify cross fades are plagued by inconsistent timing and unexpected audio changes.

• With smooth, overlapped transitions replacing annoying silence gaps, Pandora could improve TSL (time spent listening) measurements, because users would be less likely to tune-away in reaction to what they might perceive as persistent technical glitches with their Internet connection.  Longer TSL numbers give the ad sales team a distinctive advantage in terms of improved likelihood of advertiser message penetration.  And, with better audience measurement numbers, Pandora could justify higher ad rates.

• For subscription users already paying to hear their music streams without commercial interruption, replacing the constant service interruption that silence gaps cause, with continuously smooth music-flow would result in an increase in user satisfaction.  And if Pandora marketing teams could position this obvious improvement to the listener experience as a unique feature—a higher standard of care—while their competitors were still pushing streams with a disruptive sub-standard music-flow operation, Pandora could earn an increase in paid subscriptions.

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