Pandora on smart speakers: "From head-scratcher to head-turner"

Streaming service Pandora explained its views on the growing importance of smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo, including some figures on how Pandora listeners are using them.

Pandora’s Glenn Peoples, in a blog post, citing a recent study by Edison Research indicating that 58% of Echo owners use the device for music, averaging around four hours and 34 minutes a week, wrote:

In fewer than three years, the smart speaker has gone from head-scratcher to head-turner.

Peoples added that Pandora had 1.6 million active users of smart speakers in the second quarter of this year, sparking 282% year-on-year growth in listening from these devices. He also pointed to recent claims by eMarketer that there’ll be 58.9 million smart-speaker users in the US alone by the end of 2020; and by Gartner that they’ll be used by 3.3% of global households by the same year.

According to another Edison Research study, 57% of smart-speaker owners subscribe to a music service, with 28% saying that it was the device that spurred them to start paying for music-streaming. “Just as the iPhone became a launching pad for music streaming services, the VA smart speaker can become a new gateway for streaming services to reach potential subscribers”, wrote Peoples.

The growth of these devices, which remains in its early stages, is fuelling some important debates for the music industry. One is over how people will navigate the streaming catalogues and discover new music with voice interfaces rather than screens. Another is whether smart speakers can fuel other ways to interact with musicians and music culture beyond just playing the music. There’s the potential for commerce – voice-driven ticketing chatbots as floated by Ticketmaster VP Ismail Elshareef in a Music Ally interview last September.

And finally there is the controversy brewing around the fact that the three most prominent smart-speakers by the end of 2017 – Echo, Google Home and Apple’s HomePod – will come from technology giants that also run their own music-streaming services. That’s no different from the dynamics in the smartphone market with Apple and Google, but it’s already driven a complaint to European politicians by Spotify and Deezer, with pureplays – Pandora falls into this category too of course – concerned about another hardware route to listeners where the gatekeepers are also their rivals.