Tracking Pandora downloads 22
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 2:24 pm EDT
PreCentral forum member sixerztres is a cool dude in our book - he’s taken the time to mark down how many downloads the webOS version of Pandora has logged every day for the past month and even put it into a handy graph for easy visual consumption. There are a few interesting take-away points that sixertres noted:
- Pandora downloads tend to spike during the weekend.
- Downloads during the period were highest during the first two weeks of August (after Palm ramped up its advertising campaign). During this week downloads averaged 3054/day.
- The average day netted 2825 downloads of the Pandora app.
- Pandora is not available to users in Canada, so download numbers should reflect only US users.
During sixertres’ observations, Pandora was downloaded approximately 96,000 times, prior to that around 225,000 times. It’s not known whether the App Catalog download count include update downloads or replaced phone backup downloads. In other words, we don't know if tracking these downloads can map well to guessing at the number of sold Pre phones (cue sketchy analyst investor note in 5, 4...), but it might be possible that the dip in late August is not a good sign for Palm and Sprint.
Those caveats aside, Pandora is a fairly ubiquitous app and we can assume that a good number of Pre owners have downloaded it. As of this writing Pandora’s logged over 321,000 downloads.
So we've got to ask, how do you use Pandora?
22 Comments
I used to use it, but i like the net2stream app alot better so i use that daily
There was a point I was addicted to Pandora, but lately I just don't listen to music as often. I still listen to it on the trip to and from work on occasion.
I used to be a huge advocate for Pandora but once they put the 40 hour limit per month I hit that in the first week. I refuse to pay .99 cents a month - yes I know I'm cheap and it is mainly the principle for me. I have gone to other platforms to listen to my music now. I would not be worried about the late August drop because that is when Pandora put their 40hr/month time limit into effect.
NANplayer >pandora
I thought I would use Pandora to discover new artists that sounded a little bit similar to the artists I already liked. It turns out XM/Sirius is still going to be better for that sort of thing, even though it's supposedly not as targeted to my tastes:
1. Maybe it's because their "music genome" or whatever they call it requires a professional musician to laboriously review every track they add, I don't know. But whatever the reason, Pandora seems to heavily favor not only major-label acts, but hits compilations by major-label acts.
2. There are many artists Pandora has listed as available, but if you put their names in, you'll seldom if ever hear their music on the channel created in their name. Often, the music they play for those artists is related only by year of release or other non-musically-related qualities.
3. They'll find a way to put Coldplay on almost any channel you create. Beatles? Coldplay. Early Genesis? Coldplay. U2? Coldplay. Ben Folds? Coldplay. Grandaddy? Coldplay. Radiohead? Coldplay. Early 80s synth pop? Coldplay. Obscure late 70s prog-rock bands? Coldplay. Black Sabbath? Well, I haven't heard Coldplay yet but I assume it's coming.
4. If you dare to make a channel out of a single song, or add a single song to an existing channel, it seems to have the same effect as a "randomize" button. I assume this is because a single song doesn't have enough traits to produce meaningful links to other music.
So, I was originally eager to pony up 12 bucks for a year of new music discovery, maybe even 36 bucks a year for more skips and no ads (not that there are many), rather than the 10 bucks a month I spent on XM before I let it lapse. But now I'm thinking maybe XM wasn't so bad.
I do have to say, though, that even using my Pre on an OTA network connection and playing through a cheap FM transmitter that goes in my lighter jack, Pandora actually sounds better than the XM that's built into my car stereo.
Derek -- How many unique homebrew users do you estimate there are on Precental today? That would give us a good indication of how close a proxy Pandora downloads are for the total Homebrew base.
Does anyone know how many updates have been pushed out by Pandora since the Pre was launched on june 6th?
Oh wow -- I forgot Pandora was not a homebrew app but part of the App Catalog -- so this is worse than I thought. You are right. If the percentages of surveyed Pre-owners here is representative of the general population this is not good news.
Worse yet, if the downloads include Pandora updates then the number of unique users is even lower.
There has got to be a flaw in our logic, no? Anyone, Bueller?
The flaw is that we are representative of the total Pre user community. We are not. People come to PreCentral for two reasons - they are power users or they are users in search of help. Power users are more likely to read articles and answer polls, and more likely to download apps like Pandora.
How was that emotional? Your comment just comes across as a poor attempt to discount Brian's opinion. You should have just left off the first line of your response.
Ha ha, Derek. The running availability of "you're an insensitive clod" options in the votes is cracking me up... You. Insensitive. Clod.
I live in Canada and downloaded this app, but it doesn't work here. Of course I didn't know that until I downloaded it.
In fact there are a lot of apps that are designed for the US only. Realizing that the US is Palm's largest market (for now) they should really do one of two things 1) let us know that it is a US app only 2) make them universal apps....or at the very least true NA apps.
I would imagine that when the European version of the Palm Pre comes out, there will be a whole different app store avaiable to them.