Pandora Media shares jump on IPO debut

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Shares of Pandora Media Inc. jumped more than 45% in the company’s public-market debut on Wednesday, landing the streaming media firm a market value of nearly $3.7 billion right out of the gate.

Pandora P +29.25%   priced its initial public offering late Tuesday at $16 per share — above its recently raised range of $10 – $12 per share.

The stock kicked off trading Wednesday morning on the New York Stock Exchange, surging to $23.18 in early trades.

The company said in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it expects to have about 159.7 million shares outstanding following the offering, though that number could rise to 161.9 million if underwriters exercise their over-allotment options.

Pandora sold 14.68 million shares in the offering. About 6 million of those shares came from the company, representing a total value of about $96 million under the offering price. The remaining 8.68 million shares came from selling shareholders.

Lead underwriters of the offering were Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Citigroup.

The company provides Internet radio services under both a subscription-based and advertising model. The services make use of both user listening patterns and a technology called the Music Genome Project to match up music for listeners tastes.

– Continue reading at MarketWatch

Lessons from Pandora’s tough road to IPO

Sometime this week, if all goes well, Pandora will start trading on the NYSE at a rumored $2 billion market capunder the “P” ticker. The “P” could very well stand for “pivot.” Most people nowadays think of Pandora as the personalized streaming radio service or app. But it actually started out as Savage Beast Technologies, which licensed music recommendation technology to retailers like Best Buy.

It oversaw the Music Genome Project, an ambitious, even quixotic attempt to comprehensively analyze music according to its attributes or “genes.” It was all very “dot-com.” We at Live365, another Internet radio effort, were aware of Pandora as a little startup in the music recommendation space. There have been many music recommendation companies, but few of them have achieved much traction. And so it was for the Music Genome Project.

In 2004, as I was in the process of leaving Live365, Larry Marcus, of Walden VC, asked me to have dinner with Pandora’s CEO, Joe Kennedy, in case there was a role for me. Walden had just put some money into the startup with Joe and a management team coming in to run it. They’d decided to use the music genome that they’d spent millions developing to create a personalized radio service. But I was having none of it at the time. Jaded from dealing with the intractable Recording Industry Association of America and the record labels, and in the process of moving east, I wished them luck. And how. – Continue reading at GigaOM