Pandora’s co-founder and CEO Tim Westergren is reportedly planning to step down as the chief executive of the streaming music company. This was reported by Recode, based on the people familiar with the company’s plans.
As per the sources, the company has not selected a replacement for Tim Westergren yet, and he will stay on as the CEO at the company until a new CEO is in place.
Tim Westergren has been running Pandora since 2016. Prior to that, the CEO slot had been occupied by a series of professional managers. Westergren, who co-founded Pandora in 2000, served as its Chief Executive and president from May 2002 to July 2004, before returning to the company as its chief executive last year.
Pandora was an early entrant in streaming music, and grew its user base to more than 80 million people — most of whom used the free version of its web radio service.
But, the company has struggled to generate enough advertising revenue to cover the cost of the free service. Also, music listeners have begun gravitating to the on-demand subscription services such as Spotify, Apple and others. Earlier this year, Pandora rolled out its version of a subscription service.
Earlier this month, satellite music company Sirius XM said it would invest $480 million in Pandora in exchange for a 19 percent stake and three board seats. The deal is yet to close.
The deal effectively killed a $150 million investment by KKR into Pandora, which the radio company decided to back out of, even though it had to pay KKR $22.5 million as a break-up fee.
Pandora is facing stiff competition from services such as Sweden’s Spotify, Apple Inc’s Apple Music, Google Play Music and Amazon.com’s Amazon Music Unlimited, which dominate the on-demand music service market.
