Image Credit: Pandora

A tough year has seen Pandora’s listener count drop from the same time last year as their year-end results are published.

Following Spotify’s Q4 results for 2020 showing another year of amazing growth for the music streaming platform, Pandora’s results sadly don’t look as positive. SiriusXM have published their Q4 and full year results for 2020 and it shows a decline for Pandora.

Pandora finished 2019 with 63.5 million total monthly active listeners, however they finished 2020 with 58.9 million. In addition, the hours of ad supported music listened to dropped from 13.44 billion to 12.5 billion going into 2021.

As a result Pandora’s advertising revenue declined by 1% to $1.18 billion for the year. SiriusXM reported this as a positive, considering the tumultuous year it seems they expected a much bigger decline in revenue and were pleased with it only falling 1%.

Overall, Pandora’s gross profit was down 8% from 2019 with a total of $571 million for 2020. However, Pandora’s paying services – Pandora Plus and Pandora Premium – both saw a net growth of 133,000 new subscribers for a total of nearly 6.3 million subscribed to both.

SiriusXM are putting the slowdown of growth in 2020 down to the effect of COVID-19 which has had a huge effect on various industries. However, the potential success for music streaming despite the difficult year can be seen in Spotify’s growth for the year having grown their userbase by over 25% in 2020.