Pandora Australia

~ the eulogy ~

Pandora was blocked at the licensing layer for its entire existence. The Music Genome Project ran in America because American webcasting rates existed as a statutory thing you could plan a business around, and everywhere else the rights had to be negotiated country by country against collecting societies that had no interest in a rate designed for somebody else's market. It gave up on the United Kingdom in 2008 for exactly that reason.

Australia and New Zealand were the exception, and for years they were the only one. The service went into beta there in July 2012 and launched properly on 10 December with apps for both phone platforms, under a local managing director hired out of Fairfax. It worked. Two million registered listeners by 2014, roughly five million by the end, in two countries with a combined population under thirty million.

On 31 July 2017 it stopped. Accounts were locked and paid subscriptions were canceled, with whatever value was left in them refunded. The public statement said the international experience had confirmed the long-term opportunity but that the company needed to focus on its core business at home, which is the sentence a company writes when the numbers are being announced elsewhere.

I never saw any of it. Turkey was not on the list, and at its widest the list had three countries on it. The message I knew instead was the one every Turkish internet user of that era could recite from memory, the notice that the service is not available in your country, delivered without a date attached and without any suggestion that one was coming. Streaming arrived here through YouTube first, and then through Spotify in 2013, and Pandora simply stayed a name in American articles.

~ the dossier ~

~ the map ~

The interesting thing about Pandora is that it was never restricted by technology or by money. It was restricted by paperwork. The company had the recommendation engine already built and the users already asking to be let in. What it did not have was a rights agreement, which is not something engineering can route around.

Australia got in because the local rights position could be made to work at a price somebody was willing to sign. That is the whole explanation for why a Sydney listener had Pandora in 2013 and a listener in Istanbul did not. Neither of them did anything to deserve their side of the line.

~ the year it happened in ~

2017 was the worst year Pandora ever had. The founder left that summer and the ticketing business the company had bought two years earlier was sold off. SiriusXM put money in around the same time, taking a position that ended with it owning the whole thing. An overseas operation with thin margins was not going to survive that kind of housekeeping.

The competitive picture had also closed. Spotify and Apple Music were both fully established in Australia by then, both offering the thing Pandora deliberately did not: choosing the song. Pandora's whole design was the radio station that guesses well, and against on-demand catalogs the guess had to be worth paying for on its own. In a market it was subsidizing from head office, it was not.

~ what got buried with it ~

Pandora went back to being an American product and stayed one. SiriusXM bought it in 2019 and has never taken it abroad again, so the five years in Australia remain the only time the service existed anywhere outside the United States.

What ended with it was the last serious attempt to export the lean-back station model. Everything that expanded internationally after 2017 expanded on the on-demand catalog, with the algorithmic radio bolted on as a feature rather than sold as the product. Pandora tried it the other way around in two countries, made it work for five years, and still could not make the rights bill smaller than the revenue.

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