Big Changes Are Coming To Pandora Soon

If you’re a Pandora user, the service that you know and hopefully love may very well be different in the next month. That’s because an investor revolt looks to be forcing the company’s sale, according to an enlightening expose’ by Music Business Worldwide, and that could come within the next two weeks by the way things are shaping up within the company.

Apparently on last Friday March 3rd new directors were scheduled to be nominated, and founder and CEO Tim Westergren’s tenure as a director was coming to an end. Since it was most unlikely that he would be renominated due to investor unhappiness, he managed to postpone the meeting was two weeks in order to gain some breathing room, which doesn’t normally happen in a publicly traded company.

The thought is that that newly appointed directors would force a sale (most likely to suitor Sirius XM) and force Westergren out as CEO. By postponing the meeting, Westergren has a chance to sell the company in that time period and keep his job, or that’s what the speculation would leave you to believe.

Pandora’s share price has taken a beating, dropping 22% since it’s IPO. It dropped 6% just in the last week after the chairman of Sirius XM parent company Liberty Media made a statement about Pandora being overvalued thanks to its operating loss of $343 million last year.

The big investors in Pandora no longer see a way to make the big money they were betting on and just want to get at least some of their money back as soon as possible, so they’re forcing the issue. That’s why you’ll see a change coming to Pandora one way or another very soon. It probably won’t go away as a company, but you can bet that by the end of the year it will be a far different service than it is right now.