PANDORA, AMAZON THROW DOWN HISTORIC ADVANCES FOR ON-DEMAND STREAMING

Insiders among both rights holders and the tech firms involved say the advances to labels from Pandora and Amazon are the biggest in history. As we noted earlier, Pandora’s pending paid service has deals with two of the three majors and a big group of indies, with WMG still to be announced; the streaming-radio leader can leverage 125 million quarterly and nearly 80m monthly users as it rolls out its on-demand offering in the near-ish future and looks poised to be a serious challenger to Spotify and Apple.

Amazon, an online sales and media titan, is building its own service—likely to be announced very soon—into the voice-activated Echo hardware platform (“Alexa, play Adele”) and is throwing down serious coin to stick it to its rivals—especially Apple, its biggest competitor for consumer ducats.