MSN re-launches its online radio services powered by Pandora
In a quite significant deal which was done under the wraps of secrecy the MSN has gone ahead and quietly re-launched its online radio services but this time with help from Pandora.
Pandora is a music recommendation engine that lets users create custom radio stations and find out more about their favorite artists and music.
Pandora is just one year old and has got almost 1.1 million monthly visitors and this new deal will give it access to the millions of MSN users.
The deal is also a plus for MSN as it will let it remain in hunt for the number one online radio spot which currently is occupied by Clear Channel and No2 being Yahoo Launchcast.
The Pandora's CEO Tim Westergren said,
"We're always looking for the right partnerships, anything to help grow the listenership.'
The MSN representative said that this deal was signed to improve the MSN radio services and this new deal will replace the old MSN radio and the Premium radio service. But the listeners can still pay to listen to the MSN radio without ads.
In what can be said to be a disturbing trend the research firm ComScore is reporting massive decline in the number of users of many popular site like Yahoo Launchcast and AOL radio. The yahoo lost some 20% ground while AOL losses have been pegged to 22%.
But what seems to be the loss for these big sites seems to be a gain for the smaller music networking sites. ComScore reported that Mercora.com saw a surge of 813% in terms of users which translate to about 1/2 million users.
Via: News.com
