SiriusXM plans to buy Pandora in a $3.5 billion all-stock deal. The result will be the world’s largest audio entertainment company.
SiriusXM was formed when Sirius and XM satellite radio services merged in 2008. It currently has 36 million subscribers in North America. Pandora has more than 70 million active users.
Strategic Media, Inc. purchases media on both platforms for many of our clients’ campaigns. What will the acquisition mean for the company?
In the short term, it should be business as usual with Pandora and SiriusXM. Pandora is primarily ad-supported and SiriusXM is mostly subscriber supported, so their sales models are very different. It will be interesting to see what changes may eventually come to one or both platforms, but having invested millions of dollars of our clients’ ad budgets on both, we already know what will and won’t work, and will advocate to get our clients what they need to reach these audiences effectively and efficiently.