Internet Radio Service Pandora Opens New Office In St. Louis

Pandora, one of the first music streaming services of its kind, is moving into St. Louis. Pandora will be moving into the Cortex innovation district, a 200-acre wide area that is surrounded by prominent universities and medical institutions. The St. Louis Business Journal discovered that Pandora’s new office will house a sales team of five to seven employees.

The company has been expanding its business rapidly since its founding in January of 2000, and now offers an ad-supported free option as well as Pandora One, a premium subscription service with no ads. Additionally, Pandora One gives users more skips and extends the amount of time they can listen before the music times out.

Pandora already has sales offices in New York City, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, among others. With this new addition, their sales team will be in many of the biggest cities in the country.

Pandora has certainly chosen a fitting area to play host to its new office; like its new tenant, the innovation district is nothing short of amazing. As its official website mentions, the innovation district boasts a variety of bio-medical and technological research facilities that promise to “hatch some of the nation’s most promising technological advances.”

Pandora is certainly an innovative company. The internet radio company was one of the first to introduce music streaming to the internet, with companies like Spotify and Slacker Radio following after.

Both Slacker and Spotify have interfaces similar to that of Pandora, and all three allow users to skip songs or give them a thumbs up or down. One small difference is that Spotify adds “liked” tracks to a playlist automatically for users and also doesn’t limit the number of skips a user has, unlike Pandora. Pandora is powered by a unique system known as the Music Genome Project, which lets users create stations based on artists they enjoy listening to and then suggests other artists or songs based on the original musicians entered.

#SocialMediaTIPS! Cortex’s latest tenant: Pandora: Music streaming service Pandora on Monday opened an office… http://t.co/nE5SaxFbLR

— iPhase Technologies (@iPhaseTechs) October 6, 2015

The move isn’t all that’s exciting for Pandora; as Inquisitr reported, the Xbox One recently began including the Pandora app for download on its consoles in December 2014.

Additionally, Pandora recently got a favorable ruling from the U.S. Copyright Office that allows it to limit royalties the company pays for songs to a reasonable rate, according to Investor Place.

The construction of a new office in St. Louis suggests that Pandora is thriving despite the availability of so many music streaming services in today’s marketplace. It seems that competitors must be unique and forward-thinking to stay ahead in the ever-changing game of streaming services, and Pandora has done just that.

CBS Local mentioned that Pandora will be working alongside rideshare service Uber in the Cambridge Innovation Center, a spin-off of a similar shared-work facility in Boston. The Innovation Center’s staff is dedicated to hosting and managing offices for startups ranging in size from a single founder to a company of thirty-plus employees. It was founded in 1999 with the mission of helping to grow startups, and today has drawn over $1 billion in investments.

[Image Credit: CBS Local St. Louis]