Pandora’s plans to launch its new subscription services may get clearer tomorrow.
Pandora won’t announce its new music services tomorrow
CEO Tim Westergren is speaking at a Citi conference, and wanted to deliver some news when he does.
Asa Mathat for Vox Media
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Pandora CEO Tim Westergren is scheduled to speak at a Wall Street conference on Wednesday, and would like to be able to tell investors then that his company has lined up music label deals that will let him launch two new subscription services.
It’s not clear that he’ll be able to do that, though.
As I’m typing this, I’m told Pandora still doesn’t have all of the labels locked down. But that kind of pre-launch brinksmanship between a music service and music labels isn’t unusual, and these things often get resolved in the hours before a deadline.
In this case, the deadline is Westergren’s appearance at Citi’s Global Technology Conference in New York, which is set for tomorrow afternoon.
UPDATE: It’s not going to happen. Westergren doesn’t plan on making the announcement on Wednesday, industry sources say.
Pandora wants to launch two new services this fall. One would be a Spotify/Apple Music-style on-demand service, priced at $10 a month, which gives listeners access to any music they want, when they want it.
Pandora also wants to launch a $5 a month service that offers less flexibility than the more expensive service, but more options than Pandora’s free web radio service, used by most of its 76 million users.
As I’ve previously reported, Amazon is also working on a mid-priced music service of its own. Amazon wants to sell that one for $4 or $5 a month, but would only offer it on its Echo hardware.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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