Despite the widespread and growing popularity of the streaming music service Pandora, it faces one big obstacle: If you’re offline, you’re out of luck.
But it’s clear that Pandora wants to fix that situation, especially since rivals such as Spotify and Apple Music have ways you can listen offline. Today at the M1 Summit mobile conference in San Francisco, a Pandora executive’s comments suggested that the company is seriously considering an offline mode.
The comments came in response to a question posed to several mobile companies on a panel, including Pandora and the mobile sports ticket service Gametime. “It’s something we’re looking at,” said Lisa Sullivan-Cross, vice president of growth marketing at Pandora. “It’s on our minds.”
Asked after the panel for more details, Sullivan-Cross declined to add much. “We know our customers want it,” she told Forbes. “I don’t know if or when.”
It’s not as if Pandora is losing much if any ground to rivals for the lack of an offline mode. Neither Apple Music nor Spotify make it easy to listen to songs when you’re offline. In fact, it’s quite complex. And Pandora has continued to offer other improvements, including new ways to find music introduced last week.
Still, the company needs a boost. Competition from the likes of Apple Music and even Alphabet, the holding company for Google, is taking a toll on Pandora. Its shares are down about 45% on the year, though for other reasons as well as competition. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple Music has amassed more than 15 million members. And a new subscription service from Alphabet, YouTube Red, includes a free subscription to Google Play Music.
But while an offline mode might make Pandora relatively more attractive, it won’t be easy to implement. The biggest obstacle is that music labels almost certainly would demand that Pandora pay an additional license fee for the privilege. And it's not clear the cost would be worth it to Pandora, which has clashed repeatedly with labels and some artists over royalties. Or the labels may not want to allow it at all, or at least impose restrictions that make it as difficult to use as on other services.
Pandora faces another obstacle too: Its business model is still mostly built on advertising. And offline, it’s difficult to run ads--and impossible to serve them in real time, which increases their relevance and thus their value.
So despite Pandora’s evident desire to give customers the offline access they want, don’t look for it to arrive anytime soon.
