“Satellite radio firm Sirius XM Holdings Inc will buy music streamer Pandora Media Inc in a $3.5 billion all-stock deal, as it seeks to build scale to battle heavyweight streaming rivals Spotify and Apple Music,” Reuters reports. “Sirius XM, controlled by media mogul John Malone’s Liberty Media Corp, has built a name supplying more than 175 channels to car drivers, but has largely trailed Pandora and Spotify Technology SA in mobile and streaming content.”
“Monday’s deal gives the pair a market value of about $34 billion, topping Spotify’s $31.2 billion and follows through on Sirius’ purchase of a 15 percent preferred-stock stake in Pandora for $480 million last year,” Reuters reports.
“Pandora shareholders will receive a fixed-exchange ratio of 1.44 newly-issued SiriusXM shares for each share they hold,” Reuters reports. “The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2019.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Seems like a no-brainer acquisition for SiriusXM.
Simple mathematics makes it blatantly obvious what’s going to happen to Pandora. – MacDailyNews, September 24, 2013
longtime Pandora fan…….hoping the experience doesn’t go downhill…..not holding my breath.
Love SiriusXM and they have a very diverse selection of options for subscribers. Biggest fear if they were sold to a company like Apple with a political agenda would not be the same …
The xm streaming app is pretty good. I like it just BECAUSE it has JUST 175 channels. I guess THAT is now blown all to heck and back.
Of course, I’m an old fart, and given that I have about 1100 albums (about 10,000 songs) in iTunes that I own, I’ve never got into this “streaming thing”.
When I need to stream something, youtube is good enough. Even when I don’t have something I own on my iPhone, I still have 200 other albums so on it, so I just listen to something else. That kind of behavior is acceptable to me but I can imagine that it isn’t acceptable to someone younger than 50. 🙂
I sort of debate whether at this point Pandora was worth or is worth 3 Billion… but thats just my humble opinion…
One loser buying another, next Netflix and Spotify.
I don’t see the value in acquiring Pandora. I especially don’t see the business case for spending 3 Billion on them. I get that there is some interest in the free tier of streaming music, but I tend to see most going with Spotify and Apple Music. I currently have XM Sirius as well, but I’ve been questioning the value of that recently.
SiriusXM has the worst customer experience. They will not allow you to cancel their service online, though you can upgrade your subscription online. You have to call, and then the CS rep will bombard you with the whole phone script on not quitting by offering you all sorts of deals.
The deals are fine, but it’s brutal to have to deal with those people every 6 months. I don’t care how good a deal they offer, their internet unfriendly way to deal with people who want to cancel is insane.