Irving rips Pandora, other stuff

BUT HOW DOES HE REALLY FEEL? Irving Azoff railed against Pandora on Tuesday at TheGrill, TheWrap’s annual media conference, saying the online radio company is “on our shit list.” Moderator Judd Apatow pressed Azoff on everything from the music exec threatening Sly Stone with a gun, to the evil of Steve Jobs, to the music-licensing business, but Azoff reserved his harshest words for Tim Westergren’s online digital radio service. “It’s horseshit,” he said. “The market cap for Pandora is like $1.8 billion. That’s roughly the market cap of Live Nation, and they are whining about wanting to pay artists less.” Azoff added that the quality of Pandora was “shitty” compared to Spotify, iTunes and iHeartRadio. Discussing changes in the music biz as a whole, Azoff said, "It's way different now. It’s way more difficult. The odds are stacked against you. In an earlier age, a hit record would help you sell out three days in Los Angeles. Now you can't get a hit, and if you do, you open for someone in a club. It used to be that no one wanted to go on a music competition show. Now everyone wants to appear on American Idol and The Voice. And even when you succeed on these shows, success is fleeting… I can count on one hand the number of people who’ve sustained off of that. It shows that even with the massive exposure of network TV how hard it is to make it in music.” (10/4p)