Pandora gets millions more listeners
It's a good news, bad news kind of thing for Pandora - the good news is that in the last week, Pandora added millions of new listeners - the bad news is that they have partnered with MSN radio to do so.
MSN Radio has been leaking listeners- so they are hoping to stem the tide by giving their listeners a more compelling listening experience. MSN Radio still has the same set of 3000+ stations, but now on their main page is a a launcher for the Pandora player. It's the same old Pandora player - placed inside a larger window showing Microsoft's advertisements. The music even seems to be coming from Pandora and not MSN Radio - so they haven't fully integrated Pandora into MSN radio .
Why is partnering with MSN Radio bad news? Microsoft has a bit of a history trampling over its partners. The recent abandonment
of its PlayForSure DRM for the Zune left the many MSN customers, audio
player manufacturers and music service providers very unhappy.
Hopefully Pandora won't have the same fate. More in the article on CNET - MSN, Pandora snyc[sic] online radio