Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

As Tom Taylor relays in his newsletter:

Pandora.com’s Westergren held a ‘listener meet-up’ at the Chelsea Cinemas – where he declared that satellite radio and terrestrial radio are ‘in the crosshairs’ and that his goal is to “transform radio.” Westergren’s got some heavy numbers on his side – the online custom music site has 17 million registered users total, does about a million unique users a day, and has between 100,000 and 200,000 listeners tuned in at any given moment (something comparable to broadcast radio’s AQH).

Wait a minute! Is Tom saying that all of radio nationwide has an AQH comparable to 200k? I am not exactly a ratings book wonk, but that seems more like the AQH of a single medium sized market to me. Arbitron Spring Book 07 put’s it at 21 million. Now, I am not trying to take anything away from Pandora, as they are certainly doing a good job building their product virally, but these kinds of stories can take on a very wild flavor when numbers are off by 100 to 1!

As far as the claim itself, I find it interesting when just last month it was reported that Pandora’s entire model was under threat by licensing fees. So reader beware of drawing too much of a conclusion from this report from New York.