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Topspin co-founder joins Pandora
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 30 June 2015
While Wall Street will be closely watching the Pandora share price later today, wondering what impact the arrival of Apple Music will have on the publicly listed US streaming service, the artist and label community might be instead wondering what to make of the appointment of Shamal Ranasinghe – best known as co-founder of direct-to-fan platform Topspin – to the role of Pandora’s VP Of Product Management, Artists And Music Makers.
In his new role Ranasinghe, last seen working on another music tech start up called Fluence, will be charged with developing new products and services to benefit the artist and music community, in addition to Pandora’s existing AMP data platform, which we assume is already being further enhanced via the streaming firm’s recent acquisition of Next Big Sound.
Pandora has been putting increased efforts into providing services for artists and labels of late, of course, in a bid to improve its relations with the music community as it concurrently tries to bash down the royalties it pays to rights owners, performers and creators.
In the US, Pandora gets to licence recording rights via a compulsory licence with rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board, while so far the publishers have been forced to licence their rights via their collecting societies subject to rate court intervention. Therefore, Pandora doesn’t need to negotiate direct deals with anyone, and has generally done what it can to persuade the CRB and rate courts to keep its royalty commitments as low as possible.
Which is why everyone hates Pandora. Apart from the 80 million people who use the mainly ad-funded service of course, which is a truly impressive active-user base given the personalised radio set-up is only available in three markets, and most users are in the US. So Pandora has been trying to use its reach and data to placate artists who are pissed off about the royalty situation.
Ranasinghe will presumably play a key role in those efforts moving forward, maybe also looking to add some direct-to-fan channels into the mix.
Confirming his new job, he wrote in a blog post yesterday: “My career has been committed to building products and services for the creative community, so I’m super excited to join Pandora as a VP Of Product to continue on that mission. I’ll be working with some great people on building a better bridge between the music makers and Pandora’s massive base of music fans. We have a chance to significantly move the needle to improve the welfare of artists, while strengthening the connection to their fans”.
It’s thought Ranasinghe will still be involved in the development of Fluence despite his new job. And presumably he’ll also find time to chew the fat with at least one former Topsin colleague, that there Ian Rogers. He, of course, has mainly been occupying his time of late on that little venture they call Apple Music, which has proven that one great way to placate artists is to do the one thing Pandora doesn’t want to do, offer them more money.
