External and Internal Environmental Analysis of Pandora Radio

External and Internal Environmental Analysis of Pandora Radio
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External and Internal Environmental Analysis of Pandora Radio
Introduction
Pandora Radio is one of the most famous online radio station featuring music streaming and common recommendations via Genome Project. However, it offers different services for both registered and unregistered users. Apart from that it also possess integration with different social media websites and ability to share the listening experience to other friends. Nevertheless, the company’s services are quite limited to few countries that include the United States and Australia. Surely, managing a company’s based on such massive external environment together with its core implications is quite difficult to manage.
External Environment
As per Daft and Marcic (2013), external environments can be divided into two broader classes; namely, general and task environments. Under the domain of general environments, it includes a number of factors that directly influence the Pandora Radio. It includes economical, demographic and different technological factors. In order to determine the demographical aspects, Alexa (2015) is used for analysis of online traffic based on different factors. It is evident form the site that most of site’s audience belong to Australia, United States and China accounting for around 1.3%, 94.9% and 0.5% visitors respectively. However, from the gender’s perspective, Pandora Box is quite popular among females as compared to males.

Also, on educational grounds the site has been an attraction for various teens that are not in college or have been to some college. Surely, it provides grounds of improvement for enhancement in internet traffic and customers’ attention. The browsing location also plays quite a crucial role in this domain accounting for highest usage at schools as compared to that at work or home.
Besides the demographical aspect, the economic aspect also plays quite crucial role in financial viability of the company. It surely depends on the number of customers visiting the site and the “bouncing rate”. As per Quantcast (2015), the biggest market of Pandora Radio has suffered massive setback as part of its reduction in customers. By the end of March 30, 2015, the total number of people visiting the site was around 1,599,088; whereas, it has dropped 19% to around 1,291,761. Also, the website is facing a high bounce rate of 73.8% which implies that almost three-quarters of the customers leave the site without using the services of it. The major reason can be because of different weaknesses and threats faced by company (which will be discussed in the next section). Technological aspects also play quite a crucial role in this regard, however, there are a number of potential weakness that is hindering the progress of the firm on the large scale.
On task related grounds, it can be considered to be related to customers and their personal likings as they indirectly influence Pandora Radio’s as an organization. The most severe aspect in this regard is that there have been a large number of potential channels including last.fm and VEVO that provide much better services at almost no cost. In order to compete that the company should have to look into its differentiation policies and incorporate different changes as part of their organizational structure.
Internal Analysis
Despite all the negative aspects of the firm, the company still enjoys a number of potential advantages over other firms. Some of it includes the deliverance of services beyond Mobile Apps, Website, and IP TV by facilitating integration with home electronics and car audio systems. The company also provides corporate solution to different businesses in need of their services thereby providing themselves a viable mean. The platform also provides opportunity for different firms to post their advertisement in almost every format. Also, the very concept introduced with Pandora Radio is to store favorite music and make a collection of it without the need for purchasing it. Also the strength of Pandora radio lies in music discovery they discover new music, bands. Since 2002 they have legacy to discover new music and present to listener and until now not a single company beat in that. Unlike any other radio channels, specifically VEVO, the contents also include different comedy and concerts based videos.
However, as evident before, the company possesses a number of weaknesses too. The basic weakness of Pandora Radio’s is in their services. They give their services on IPTV (Internet Protocol television). This protocol supports both audio & video services. Unfortunately Pandora Radio’s use only its audio services. It’s a major drawback because nowadays is that every person and/or Pandora Radio user wants to see the video of his/her favorite songs, programs, and playlists. That’s a reason users are switching very fast to other providers who can give them both entertainment. Music catalog is second drawback of Pandora Radio’s. most user want to play latest song of their artist they love and its prime duty of radio’s that they have in their music catalog so user can find it and play but unlikely in Pandora’s radio they don’t update their music catalog in every week. On the other side of the picture, Spotify the big rivalry of Pandora’s Radio. Spotify music catalog is 20-times larger than Pandora because they update their music catalog every consecutive weeks that is the major reason why many users of Pandora’s radio sign-up for the Spotify account to use it. The large catalog of music is another severe drawback or problem inherent within the system of Pandora Radio. On social networking grounds, Pandora radio’s is not quite good to connect the user to each other. However, in more precise words, it is frustrating to share the songs for Pandora radio’s users because there are quite many restrictions where user can frustrate easily. Pandora gives the ability to share their favorite station to your Facebook /Twitter friends; however, Spotify give the ability to share songs/playlist to your Facebook /Twitter friends. Pandora radio’s and other radios on free version of apps has very similar features that cannot be differentiated based on whether who is providing any new service in free version but when we come in paid version. Surely, there are some hitches in Pandora radio as the membership deal is about $4.99 with free playback, ad free, downloads available. Pandora paid version is commonly known as Pandora One. On the other hand, Spotify gives $9.99 membership gain the host of free version has different deal for students, family and also gives some limited offers (Debate.org, 2015; Spotify for Artists, 2015).
Competitors and Rivals
Along with some weaknesses, there are some severe threats coming from the business rivalry as these weaknesses can become strength for other rivals too. Pandora only offers music to users and VEVO provides both to user and hence, VEVO is enhancing its users’ base (Forbes, 2015). There are plenty of opportunity for Pandora radio, Establish marketing strategy so it can help you to produce new ideas to how to gains users from our rivalry companies .In the meantime, they have worked in their contents. Apart from that, they can invite musician songs writer and singers which can gives it additional promotion advantage. Updating the music library frequently can also help to gains users’ interest. Developing music catalog where users can find music which they want to listen it also gives additional points. Add video option and other new contents and try to give more listening hours and reduced advertisement timeslots because it annoys most user and leave also facilitate some deals for premium account members. Also, giving the users social features to share their songs or entire playlist to friends/followers would also gain better competitive edge against rivals. Another strategy that companies use is to merge with competitors for kill the threats. It should include recommended music feature to users because it’s a new and innovative idea and may help to find user what they want to listen and save time of users (Anderson and Moore, 2006).
Organizational Structure and Its Impact
The firm enjoys a centralized organization structure having all the chief executives in different domain including the founder, chief marketing officer, general counsel, chief financial officer, chief human resources manager, chief strategy officer, chief revenue officer, head of products and chief technology officer (Pandora Group, 2015). However, the major change in this regard is the hiring of McAndrews as the new CEO of Pandora Radio. The major reason is because of his prominent presence in advertising industry and can enhance revenue to desired targets (Guglielmo, 2015).
Conclusion
Pandora radio’s is biggest radio network having millions of users of listeners. This firm has a great legacy of discovery music and their services are best of all. It gives a good entertainment for users. Online and social feature makes it’s globally famous it contents are unique. Recently it introduced a car Pandora radio and millions of taking interest in this. But Pandora Radio it only managed few countries and they only provide the access to Pandora radio to these countries U.S., Australia and New Zealand these countries. So, in order to sustain, the company should have to turn their weaknesses into strengths and their strengths into their strongholds.

References
Anderson, R., & Moore, T. (2006). The economics of information security.Science, 314(5799), 610-613.Daft, R., & Marcic, D. (2013). Understanding management. Australia: South-Western Cengage Learning.
Debate.org,. (2015). Is Spotify better than Pandora?. Retrieved 29 May 2015, from http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-spotify-better-than-pandora
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Guglielmo, C. (2015). Pandora Names Former aQuantive Chief Brian McAndrews As CEO, Shares Rise. Forbes. Retrieved 29 May 2015, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/09/11/pandora-names-former-aquantivemicrosoft-exec-brian-mcandrews-as-ceo/
Pandora Group,. (2015). PANDORA – Competence of the Board. Retrieved 29 May 2015, from http://investor.pandoragroup.com/competence.cfm
Quantcast,. (2015). pandora.com’s audience profile on Quantcast. Retrieved 28 May 2015, from https://www.quantcast.com/pandora.com#!traffic
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Spotify for Artists,. (2015). Spotify Explained. Retrieved 29 May 2015, from http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/