Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has just announced its beefed up Radio feature onstage at LeWeb, innocuously intro-ing it as a radio app that the Spotify New York team built on top of the recently launched app platform. Ek however did not mince words when describing the feature, “It’s kind of like Pandora with unlimited skipping and unlimited stations.”
Ouch.
Pandora, which is now an achingly public company, currently limits users to 100 stations and eight song skips. Think about this for a second.
“We think people will love playing around,” Ek went on about the company’s streaming play. “What we’ve discovered is that we’re a lean back experience and a lean forward. Spotify historically hasn’t been very good at curating music … [And Radio] is a big use case that a lot of people are asking us for.”
And then, “I wouldn’t say that Pandora is a competitor, we want to be a music platform.” Yeah, music platform that just subsumed Pandora’s basic function. Sure it isn’t available yet on mobile, which is Pandora’s primary advantage. When asked when that feature would launch, Ek told me backstage, “Very soon.”
Despite the service’s successful US launch and scale (Ek said that it’s seen 7 million users hop on since f8), Ek said that there is still no IPO in sight.
