Pandora Australia leads music platforms for time spent

Australians spend more time with internet radio giant Pandora than any other music streaming platform.

That’s according to industry digital ratingsreleasedby Nielsen and IAB late last week. The data measuring audience, sessions andtimeper personacross digital platforms in February 2016, found Pandora lead the way. Its listeners spend between 2.2 hours and 3.2 hours per day on the platform.

Pandora’s RickGleave, director, business development ANZ, said around 95% of Pandora’s audiences are engaged via its ad-supported model.

“Time spent is a true measure of engagement for advertisers and we’re seeing listeners spend more time with Pandora compared to other players in the industry,”he said.

The local data follows similar findings in the US in 2015. Data released by ComScore found Pandora beat all apps for timespentincluding, Facebook, Google and YouTube. Listening hours were up 5% to 21.1 billion for the full year, and 3% more to 5.37 billion for the fourth quarter of 2015. But active user numbers are dropping: in the fourth quarter, they went down from 81.5 million to 81.1 million. In Australia Pandora has over 3.5 million registered users and 1 million active each month.

Elsewhere in Nielsen and IAB’s Digital Ratings (Monthly) report, Google, Facebook and YouTube were the Top 3 websites, with YouTube’s reach of the Australian market in February at over 70%.

The data found Australians spent more than 28 hours just on their smartphone in February, higher than any other digital device. Computers are still the device of choice for most Australians (approx. 18 million people), but the data shows over 13 million people were actively browsing websites / apps on smartphones in February 2016, meanwhile tablets saw 7.5 million people doing the same.

In February Pandora posted record full-year revenues. In 2015 Pandora’s revenue was up 26% to US$1.16 billion (A$1.63 billion), slightly above its expectation of $1.153 billion ($1.56 billion) to $1.158 billion ($1.6 billion).

However it made a net loss of $169.7 million ($238.7 million). This was due to a $143 million ($201.1 million) spend on “content acquisition costs” and $112 million ($157.5 million) on sales and marketing in one quarter alone.