In a bid to remain relevant as radio migrates to the internet, Clear Channel had struck a deal with Pandora to stream its interactive music stations across all of its websites, according to a Billboard article posted earlier today.
However, a deal has not been signed, according to a Clear Channel spokesman.
Billboard has since updated its article to say that Clear Channel is readying some sort of online streaming service, but that it is eying a link-up with Pandora, as opposed to having already signed a deal. A Clear Channel representative just told me that the that expression "'eying' is wrong," and that the company "hasn't announced a partner" for its upcoming streaming service.
Update (5/13): Tim Westergren, who was traveling yesterday, called today to clear up the confusion. He said, "we've been in discussions with them for a while and we're going to run a very small test at the end of the summer on a couple stations."
My interpretation of the situation is that Clear Channel is still innegotiations with one or more potential streaming partners (after all,
there are several other options for such a partner including imeem,
Last.fm, Slacker and others).
Considering that Clear Channel is as widely-known for homogenizingradio as Pandora is for reinvigorating the format online, news of the deal came as somewhat of a surprise, philosophically speaking. But it would makesense for both companies – financially for Pandora, and strategicallyfor Clear Channel.
When we last heard from Pandora, it was licking its wounds after fighting hard for workable webcasting rates in Washington. To a great extent, it lost that battle. Webcasters apparently managed to negotiate away per-channel minimums that would have crushed businesses like Pandora. But the per-song rates
determined by the Copyright Royalty Board have stuck, giving Pandoraample reason to strike deals with whomever it can. The rates, initiallyproposed by SoundExchange, even led to speculation that the record labels secretly wanted to create a situation where deep-pocketed Google would buy Pandora.
On the Clear Channel end of the equation, the dealwould bring a new way for the company to stay involved with music programming as itsaudience shifts online. "If we don't expand our offerings under ourumbrella, people will just go elsewhere for it," explained Clear Channelexecutive VP Evan Harrison.
In addition to a streaming with an as-yet-unannounced partner, Clear Channel plans to repackage some of its stations as embeddablewidgets on social networks using Clearspring, which works withFacebook, Blogger, MySpace, OpenSocial and Windows/Mac desktops – and asa Facebook app. Clear Channel's Pandora stations will be able to gopretty much anywhere too, so the only thing left to determine iswhether people will use them.
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