With its co-founder stepping down as CEO, Pandora’s streaming service will no longer be available to Australian and New Zealand markets.
Music streaming service Pandora will be shutting down its operations in its only two international markets — Australia and New Zealand — in order to focus on its operations in the US.
The news comes via a report from Billboard, to whom a representative of the service stated that operations would wind down over the next few weeks so that the company can “remain laser-focused on the expansion of [its] core business in the Unites States”.
Pandora’s co-founder, Tim Westergreen, recently announced he was stepping down as CEO as part of this refocusing, along with the departure of the company’s chief marketing officer and president. The business had also made a number of larger financial moves in recent weeks, such as selling off its TicketFly brand and securing investment from SirusXM.
While not in a leading position against other music streaming services in the Australia and New Zealand markets, Pandora is still one of the current major players and as of February 2017 apparently had around 4.5 million paid subscribers and 81 million active users. Further to this, the company had partnerships with some of the region’s larger businesses such as Optus, Woolworths and Rolling Stone.
The outcome for current subscribers and whether or not they will be reimbursed for any subscriptions they currently hold is unclear, as is the future of the ANZ region employees which number around 100.
