Piper Jaffray: Apple’s iTunes Radio trails Pandora in Twitter sentiment

“Piper Jaffray said Tuesday it is introducing a new, weekly, Twitter analysis of tweets in order to ‘measure the consumer sentiment trends between iTunes Radio and Pandora,'” Rex Crum reports for MarketWatch.

“Piper analyst Gene Munster, who covers Apple, said that while the current data only represents “a snapshot”, over time, it should result in a clearer picture of consumers’ feelings toward the rival streaming music services,” Crum reports. “For now, however, that picture is clearly in Pandora’s favor.”

“Activity shows consumer tweeting about Pandora between 300,000 and 600,000 times a day, in contrast to fewer than 50,000 daily tweets about iTunes Radio, which Apple just launched a few weeks ago,” Crum reports.

Read more in the full article here.

18 Comments

  1. Gene Munster is an asshat. This is like using how many people honk their horn as an indication for car sales.

    I use iTunes Radio, but guess what I’m not doing while I use it? Tweeting. You know what I AM doing? Listening to music.

    Thanks Gene.

  2. I don’t see why Twitter sentiment is a more useful metric than listener hours, membership fee revenue and other data that have already been available.

    If Pandora members are naturally more active on Twitter than iTR users, the gap measured by Munster magnifies the underlying popularity difference between P and iTR.

  3. Ping! Pt 2

    I have tried iTunes Radio and found it wanting. First, I have the iTunes Match service- so there are no commercials.

    When you create a radio station and it plays stuff you do not wish to hear you are limited in how many songs you can jump in one hour. Sounds to me like Apple is getting $ from the labels to push certain songs- payola, essentially.

    I created 3 very different station lists and set them for discover and let them play only to find certain songs kept getting pushed onto the different stations playlist- reliably.

    Apple, you will have to do better than that.

    1. Been there, done that enough times. And OMG what crap it attempts to foist when it’s run out of decent tunes to fit the user’s requested criteria. Sometimes I swear it slips a gear and goes incoherent.

      iTunes Radio an immature software system. It requires refinement before it will be seriously competitive. Pandora started in 2000, so it’s got 13 years of experience up on Apple.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Radio

      Having pointed out iTunes Radio’s Version 1.0 Syndrome, it’s doing remarkably well. Let’s just hope Apple forces it to graduate from public beta quality in a hurry.

  4. This is ridiculous. Pandora has been on the market for more than 5 years and is available on pretty much every platform. iTunes Radio has been on the market for less than 3 months and is only available on iOS 7-updated devices. Talk to me in a years time.

    1. No. If Apple doesn’t control major streaming market share in six months iTunes Radio will be considered a stinking failure and it will only confirm how doomed Apple really is. Apple must beat all competition within the first few hours, days, weeks, or Tim Cook’s head will be on the chopping block. Market share is everything and anything less is nothing. Apple is valued only for market share and any market share it doesn’t capture is another mark against the company.

      /s

  5. That’s bc you can log into Twitter and FB to get into your Pandora. So every song you listen to, gets published automatically to Twitter.

    That’s why there is so many tweets.

  6. I’ve never bought a song/album because of listening to pandora.. Probably because it required too many clicks, fields to fill in.,

    I hear a song – like it – buy it…

    Seems to me the process is a bit more Apple and less Pandora for some.

    Personally I like it – and I’ve purchased a good amount of music – about 60 songs in total.

    There is very little money in the streaming biz.

    I’m pretty sure Apple wants you to buy – not listen.

Reader Feedback

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.