Is Freemium Working for Pandora Genome Project?

The first information era of Internet has transformed the landscape of the world by creating a network of computer smart devices. In the second era of connected revolution, Internet of Things invaded digital space and created a new connected world. In recent research, Gartner (2015), cites that the a slew of devices connected through Internet of Things will climb to approximately five billion by 2015 (Rivera, 2014). The research also estimates those slew of digital devices will create an intelligent ecosystem by connecting 20 billion of Internet of Things. However, Cisco (2015) is more optimistic in their research estimate and reports, claims slew of 50 billion devices will be connected through Internet of Things (Cisco, 2015). Cisco (2015), also reported the proliferation of the devices running Internet of Things will generate 1 Yottabytes of big data in the year of 2018. The s-curve of digital disruption of big data from Internet of Things is expected to climb by 255% from 2013 to 2018. The big data can generate from the sensors in Aerospace industry, connected cars or from electronics and home appliances to create a reinvented business model in the market. The surge of big data opened the floodgates of Internet traffic and will continue to hit the data centers at a velocity rate of 177% by 2018 (Worth, 2014).

Though Gartner (2015), featured Internet of Things and big data under separate categories under the rise of future technologies of the future in 2014, as both are tightly interwoven. In 2014, big data was highlighted as a conduit surging devices of disillusionment. Big data could shape the future of connected revolution, as it no longer is part of the Gartner’s developing technologies. Gartner emphasized convergence of cloud computing, big data, mobility, and data will lead to a new information epoch to launch the digital enterprise with digital marketing techniques (Rivera, 2015).

Many commercial flight corporations provide a range of prices to their customers. There is a high variation in terms of the pricing based on the season, occupancy rate of the passengers in the flight, and trade promotions applied to the pricing. The systems run on a wide range of database systems that are not connected to each other. Passengers do not have the access to the pricing information to optimize the results. Passengers need the ability to visualize, discover, and identify the seasonality of the flights availability. Information Technology company ITA internal big data analytics runs through all the airline carriers database systems to glean the big data from their systems to provide the passengers with latest and most accurate prices on a multichannel foundation layer of big data analytics to the consumers. Google recently acquired ITA software and powered their big data analytics platform by Google Analytics to bring harmonization to their data processes. The result is just amazing. Google ITA software now can deliver real-time predictive analytics to passengers on the availability of the flight, pricing information on the flights, rental cars, and hotels. In another big data initiative, IBM joined forces with Twitter to crawl through the social media unstructured data to glean the insights and wrangle the data to understand the customer perspectives (Pham, 2015).

In today’s world, customers are connected with big data to smart digital devices. The surge of digital disruption created new e-commerce models in the world to operate their businesses. Especially in the music industry, the music has shifted from cassettes to Compact Discs and subsequently to MP3 format songs. The new revolution of the music is gearing towards streaming the music digitally through smartphones, computers, satellite radio such as Sirius XM Radio, Internet radio, and smart wearable devices. Pandora is a streaming music service. It can connect to a whole slew of connected devices such as receivers that can transmit audio and video signals, connected Blu-ray players, a bevy of satellite or cable operators, Sony’s gaming devices such as Sony or Microsoft, cars, and 100s of devices including streaming players. By the time you’re reading this, Sirius XM Satellite Radio owns Pandora (Pandora, 2015).

In the recent times, Pandora is facing fierce competition from music streaming companies. Apple has started Apple Music subscription plan to stream the music through several devices. With the launch of new service and streamlining it into iTunes, it has reached the status of 6.5 million subscribers this month. Apple Music penetrated into the new market of streaming music and currently reached a staggering number of 14 to 15 million active listeners for streaming music. Foundation DB big data analytics tool played a large role for integrating the music genres, stations, and playlists in this success (Sullivan, 2015). Apple started losing revenues on conventional iTunes music as the trend shifted towards music streaming services. It started pushing towards digital transformation of their music business into streaming. Apple to stay ahead of the curve in the competition recently acquired music analytics company Foundation DB. This big data analytics tool provides the (a) consistency to the database transformation rules; (b) granularity of read, write, and updates operations at the atomic level; © incorporation of database locking mechanism that separates out and queues up the transactional updates with the enqueue and dequeue mechanism; (d) the persistence of the database commit operations to comply the OLTP environmental disaster recovery mechanism to aid the undo and redo logs of the databases. Foundation DB had shown blazing write speeds that clocked at 14 million records per second. Apple acquired this company to curate the music trends and genres allowing audio listeners to discover new music thus increasing more subscriptions to the music (Panzarino, 2015).

Spotify another music streaming services company is the leader in the market with core of its business running on freemium business model spanning active listeners in the numbers of $70+ million and with paid subscriptions around $20 million (Page, 2015). Spotify acquired Seed Scientific big data analytics firm and collaborated with Next Big Sound big data Analytics Company for curation of the music and building playlists and showing the charts. (Vanian, 2015). Next Big Sound analytics aid the music producers and bands to analyze the composition of the population streaming the music with specific numbers of streams and integrated social media platforms. Next Big Sound analytics also aids to calculate and put a dollar value on royalties, and social streaming by gathering the statistics of the followers. This bolsters the music producers understand the popularity of the charts and playlists with segmentation of the consumers and perspectives to assist produce future music (Williamson, 2013).

Pandora in 2015 includes 80 free million active listeners (Pandora, 2015). Pandora’s freemium model is Pandora One Music service. Under this model, Pandora listeners get to listen to one million songs from the server (Smith, 2015). Pandora partnered with Next Big Sound big data analytics firm as well to stay at competition with Spotify (Palermino, 2015).

My responsibility is to introduce innovation with a new music company by devising a new digital business disruption powered by big data analytics to boost the digital streaming sales for the company and enter the foray with Pandora, Apple, and Spotify.

New Music Company requires active listeners insights to understand the consumer perspectives to design the UI interface of the streaming stations, playlists, and build new features to improve the quality of the service over the other competitors with the aid of big data analytics. In order to build partnerships with new label producers, New Music Company needs to receive the input from the customers with the requests for specific labels and features. A new big data analytics implementation can identify the trending needs of the customer by allowing them to search and discover music on New Music Company and request for labels when the content not found on existing music platform. Procuring the license of the new labels, new partnerships with music producers can be an upscale option for New Music Company without understanding the customer traffic. New Music Company can run the big data analytics tools to perform statistical analysis on such requests and build a return on investment analytics report to estimate the value of procuring new music labels and licensing of music broadcasts for a particular period (Lambert, 2015).

Identification of data sources of connectivity through big data analytics also can provide insights to New Music Company to build features for specific devices. New Music Company should provide options to build more than 100 stations. However, the curation leads to generation of new music based on the customer perspectives. Big data analytics should aid New Music Company to find partners such as SoundCloud and other music streaming services to run marketing campaigns to generate more leads on the high-value customers. Big data analytics can identify the geographical locations within US with strong customer base to create localized radio stations instead of Internet radio for New Music Company. Recently Federal Communications Commission granted Pandora the acquisition of KXMZ local radio station from Rapid City. Data mining techniques in big data can identify the genres that are popular in each region to create more ways to add the local radio stations. Identification of such strong customer base can reduce the costs significantly to run through radio waves than Internet connection. Big data analytics can provide a number of scenarios for New Music Company to calculate the return on investment and provide insights for investments (Flanagan, 2015).

The New Music Company should invest in big data analytics to access the data points from various campaigns. IBM recently started a new big data tool coupled with digital marketing analytics dubbed as IBM’s Universal Behavioral Exchange that is hosted on IBM enterprise cloud. My New Music Company should invest into this big data analytics tool. The tool can delve deeper into the events, locations, and preferences favorited by the customers for the New Music Company to stream more localized music on the radio station channels including integration with Facebook to understand the customer perspectives. IBM supports a bevy of CRM solutions to power the New Music Company’s digital analytics to advance corporation’s mission (Taft, 2015).

References

Cisco (2015). Seize New IoT Opportunities with the Cisco IoT System. Retrieved October 19, 2015, from http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/trends/iot/portfolio.html

Flanagan, A. (2015). Pandora’s Radio Station Gets FCC Approval. Retrieved October 22, 2015, from http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6553964/pandora-radio-station-fcc-approval-kxmz

Lambert, S. (2015). 10 Online Marketing Metrics Critical To Your Campaign’s Performance. Retrieved October 22, 2015, from http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/10-online-marketing-metrics-critical-to-your-campaigns-performance-01342852#GBAIGobkwwxOXUOF.97

Page, C. (2015). Apple Music closes in on Spotify with 6.5 million paying subscribers. Retrieved October 21, 2015, from http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2431150/apple-music-closes-in-on-spotify-with-65-million-paying-subscribers

Palermino, C. L. (2015). Pandora buys major data firm to get to know you better. Retrieved October 22, 2015, from http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/pandora-acquires-music-data-analytics-firm-next-big-sound/

Pandora (2015). Pandora Reports Q1 2015 Financial Results. Retrieved October 21, 2015, from http://press.pandora.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251764&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2039579

Pandora (2015). Pandora. Retrieved October 21, 2015, from http://www.pandora.com/everywhere/

Panzarino, M. (2015). Apple Acquires Durable Database Company FoundationDB. Retrieved October 22, 2015, from http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/apple-acquires-durable-database-company-foundationdb/

Pham, P. (2015). The Impacts Of Big Data That You May Not Have Heard Of. Retrieved October 20, 2015, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterpham/2015/08/28/the-impacts-of-big-data-that-you-may-not-have-heard-of/2/

Rivera, J. (2014). Gartner Says 4.9 Billion Connected “Things” Will Be in Use in 2015. Retrieved October 19, 2015, from http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2905717

Rivera, J. (2015). Gartner’s 2015 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Identifies the Computing Innovations That Organizations Should Monitor. Retrieved October 19, 2015, from http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3114217

Smith, C. (2015). By the Numbers: 45 Interesting Pandora Statistics . Retrieved October 22, 2015, from http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/pandora-statistics/

Sullivan, J. (2015). Apple Music hits a ’triple’ with 6.5 million paying subscribers, analyst says. Retrieved October 21, 2015 , from http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-apple-music-subscribers-spotify-20151021-story.html

Taft, D. K. (2015). IBM Launches Data Exchange for Marketers. Retrieved October 23, 2015, from http://www.eweek.com/database/ibm-launches-data-exchange-for-marketers.html

Vanian, J. (2015). Why Spotify just bought a data science startup. Retrieved October 21, 2015, from http://fortune.com/2015/06/24/spotify-data-acquisition/

Williamson, M. (2013). Spotify & Next Big Sound Artist Analytics. Retrieved October 21, 2015, from https://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-next-big-sound-artist-analytics/

Worth, D. (2014). Internet of Things to generate 400 zettabytes of data by 2018. Retrieved October 19, 2015, from http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2379626/internet-of-things-to-generate-400-zettabytes-of-data-by-2018