From Darling to Death and Back Again: Pandora Files for $100 Million IPO

Online music recommendation service Pandora has had quite the ride over the last several years. In 2006, ReadWriteWeb named it a runner-up in the yearly Best Little Company round-up and we had high hopes for the company. Four months later, we were writing about how Pandora founder Tim Westergren was appealing for help to “save Internet radio” from licensing fees. A year after that, the headline read “Pandora On the Verge of Closing Shop“.

Oh, how things can change. Nowadays, Pandora is everywhere, from computers to mobile phones to integrated car stereo systems. Today, the company has taken it one step further and filed for a $100 million IPO.

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According to All Things Digital’s Tricia Duryee, Pandora filed with the Securities Exchange Commission today to raise $100 million with Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Stifel Nicolause Weisel and William Blair & Company as underwriters. In it’s filing, it gave a peek at its future plans.

Pandora explained in the document that its service today is primarily a personalized radio station streamed over the Web and mobile phones, but in the future it has aspirations to do much more.

It wants to improve the service, develop new advertising products, build out its ad sales force, expand distribution to other consumer electronics and automobiles, and expand internationally. It also wants to add other types of content beyond music, such as radio formats, like talk radio or sports.

With the ubiquitous nature of Pandora these days, it’s easy to forget how close to the brink the company once came. It wasn’t until late 2009 – more than two years after we wrote about its near death experience – that it finally reached a deal with music labels.

Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson went through today’s following and came up with a bunch of interesting stats that show off the company’s recent successes. Here is an excerpt:

• Revenue for the 9 months ended October 31, 2010 was $90.12 million. That’s an increase over 30.1 million over the same months in 2009.

• Net income in the first 9 months of 2010 was…a loss of $328,000. Pandora lost $18 million during the same months in 2009.

• Pandora has more than 80 million users in the US.

• During the first nine months of 2010, Pandora ad revenue reached $78 million. That’s up from $29 million during the same period in 2009. That’s huge growth.

• Subscription revenue was $12.3 million during the first 9 months of 2010. It was $4 million during the first 9 months of 2009. That’s huge growth.

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