But the name’s much more odious, cautionary association - Pandora’s box, a source of immense, cursed trouble - crept up when the company’s power began to fade in the last decade, as its customers defected to streaming services. In Greek mythology, Pandora is a woman who receives many blessed gifts from the gods, including the gift of music, the company’s founding team explained on its website. Naming the company after the world’s most foreboding tale wasn’t the original idea. Under new parents and an aggressively remixed business model, Pandora is determined to be relevant again - if, that is, music fans are willing to take it back. Headlines lit up the company once more last month, but with a very different sheen: Satellite radio giant SiriusXM announced its intent to buy Pandora in a $3.5 billion all-stock deal, which will soon create the biggest audio entertainment company in the world. But Pandora has actually weathered that year well - and, to the surprise of many, even came out a bit stronger at the other end. “Everyone wants to feel like they’re on a winning team, and employees really loved the company but felt like it was losing,” Lynch tells Rolling Stone now, almost exactly one year after he took charge of the slipping business. Another, more to-the-point: “Pandora is in a death spiral.”īy the time Roger Lynch took over as the company’s fourth CEO in four years, the chances of rising from the ashes were slim. “The music may be over for Pandora,” one headline read. While AM/FM radio was still going strong, online radio couldn’t stack up to Spotify and Apple Music, and a series of expensive missteps sent Pandora’s stock tumbling precipitously low. It lost an executive. This time last year, Pandora was in dire straits. The company had gone from being the music industry’s gilded pioneer - exciting everyone from teens to retirees with the newfangled idea of Internet radio at the turn of the century - to a lagging joke, edged out by the rise of on-demand streaming services. Music’s most innovative business was about to implode.
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