Internap Helps Pandora Deliver Smooth Music Listening Experience
Tuesday May 23, 9:58 am ET
-- Internap Performance IP Supports Entertainment Company's 16 Million User-Generated Internet Radio Stations --
ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 23, 2006--Internap Network Services Corporation (AMEX: IIP - News), a leading provider of performance-based routing solutions over the Internet, today announced that Pandora (
www.pandora.com), an online music listening and discovery service, has increased its usage of the Internap® Performance IP service to optimize continued audio streaming of Pandora's diverse collection of music, powered by their Music Genome Project. Pandora users can create a station by simply typing in an artist name or song name to create a personalized, streamed listening experience. Users can create up to 100 stations and interactively guide the service by providing feedback on song choices and creating a personal page of "favorites". Additionally, stations can be shared with friends via email. Listeners have created 16 million stations since Pandora's launch in the fall of 2005.
Pandora's offering comprises an extensive music library of 400,000 songs (each broadcast as an 128 kbps audio stream) from a wide range of both mainstream and lesser-known music genres and is available as a free ad-supported service or by paid subscription. The team at Pandora is passionate about helping listeners discover great music that they will love through an experience that allows for both established and new musicians to be heard.
"The very core of our existence as a business is our ability to deliver a smooth listening experience. As a result our service is incredibly sensitive to the capabilities of the underlying bandwidth provider," said Tom Conrad, chief technology officer, Pandora. "We're extremely happy with Internap's combination of quality of service, cost of bandwidth, reliability, and Network Operations Center support services," he added.
"It's music to our ears that Pandora is yet another satisfied customer upgrading capacity on their Performance IP service within six months. We're the right partner to support delivery of high quality streaming media for a superior entertainment experience," said David Abrahamson, vice president of sales, Internap.
Internet radio is growing rapidly, according to The Infinite Dial: Radio's Digital Platforms, an April 2006 study by Arbitron Inc. and Edison Media Research. The study states that Internet radio's monthly audience age 12 and over now tops an estimated 52 million, an increase from an estimated 37 million people in 2005. The weekly Internet radio audience has also increased 50 percent over the past year, with 12% of the U.S. population age 12 and over (an estimated 30 million) having listened to Internet radio in the preceding week, up from 8 percent in 2005.