The CEO and co-founder, Tim Westergren, of online radio company Pandora has stepped down as CEO for the second time.
CFO Naveen Chopra will act ad interim CEO while the board searches for a replacement, The Verge reported. The company has also announced that President Mike Herring and CMO Nick Bartle will also step down from their positions as well.
The news of Westergren’s departure was first reported late Sunday by tech news site Recode. Westergren found the company back in 2000 and served as CEO from May 2002 through July 2004, and then returned in 2016. He will also no longer be a member of the Pandora Board of Directors, a statement released by the company said.
“I came back to the CEO role last year to drive transformation across the business,” Westergren said in a statement. “We accomplished far more than we anticipated. We rebuilt Pandora’s relationships with the music industry; launched a fantastic Premium on-demand service, and brought a host of tech innovations to our advertising business. With these in place, plus a strengthened balance sheet, I believe Pandora is perfectly poised for its next chapter.”
Pandora began right around the time music streaming started to become a popular passage for music listeners. The company grew its user base to over 80 million people, most of whom use the free version if its web radio service, Recode reported. However, as other on-demand subscriptions such as Spotify and Apple Music came into the picture, offering ad-free access, listeners started to drift away to other platforms. Statista reported that while Pandora only added 5 million users in the last three years, Spotify grew by 100 million users in the same period.
Although Pandora has experienced steady sales growth, especially since Westergren took over as CEO last year, the company reportedly continues to lose money and may need more cash. The company’s shares are still down 35 percent this year according to CNN.
Three weeks ago satellite radio company Sirius XM, announced that it would invest $480 million in Pandora, in return for a 19 percent stake in the company. But after the deal, the company hit an all-time low just a few days after.
Pandora has also settled to sell its Ticketfly unit to Eventbrite for $200 million recently. The company will work to integrate ticket sale with Eventbrite, rather than running its own ticket service, Verge reported.
The company doesn’t seem to be doing to too bad, but if it wishes to catch up to competitors such as Spotify, it will have to put in much more work.
