Top of the Order:
Music to Someone’s Ears: What do you want to hear? For a few bucks a month (or, in some cases, for free) you can stream practically any type of music from any musician around. Spotify. Pandora. Apple Music. Tidal. Google Play. Pick one. Anyone. Go ahead. Start listening. It shouldn’t take you more than a couple of minutes to bring up something great, like Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.” There you go. You’re welcome.
Well, if you didn’t feel you had enough choices already, then Jeff Bezos has something else for you.
On Wednesday, Amazon unveiled its new Amazon Music Unlimited service. And, as befitting Amazon’s ability to offer something for practically everyone via its online shopping site, it should come as no surprise that Amazon’s music-streaming offering would come with a similar way to appeal to as broad a listening audience as possible.
Amazon Music Unlimited will cost $9.99 a month, or $7.99 for Prime members, to have access to “tens of millions of songs and thousands of hand-curated playlists and personalized stations.” You read that right, Prime members. Unlike Amazon’s Prime video-streaming service, which you get included with your $99 a year Prime membership, you have to pay extra for Amazon Music Unlimited.
And Amazon is really pushing the interaction its new streaming music service will be able to have with the ecommerce giant’s Echo home personal assistant device. If you have one of those, you can sign up for Amazon Music Unlimited for $3.99 a month, with a free trial period. That way you can walk around your house and just call out, “Alexa, play ‘More Than a Feeling’ by Boston,” and have those harmonies and power chords immediately fill your living room.
That Amazon is launching a new streaming music service is no surprise to industry analysts like Neil Doshi of Mizuho Securities. “What is interesting to us is Amazon’s incorporation of Alexa/AI technology so users can ask Alexa to play their favorite song, album or artist.”
Doshi has a buy rating and $950-a-share target price on Amazon’s stock. By the time the market closed Wednesday, Amazon shares had risen 0.4 percent to finish trading at $834.09.
Doshi said that with Amazon offering the new music service at a 20 percent discount for its approximately 60 million Prime members, the company could see a reasonable amount of new subscribers and trial members signing up Amazon Music Unlimited before Pandora rolls out its upcoming on-demand subscription service later this year. And speaking of the pride of Oakland …
Middle Innings:
A New Look: While Amazon was touting its new foray into subscription-based streaming music, Pandora spent the day showing off a new logo.
Actually, make that a new “brand,” as Pandora calls it. It’s the first major rebranding of Pandora in more than a decade, and it is twofold. The “P” that you see in places like the Pandora mobile phone app is still going to be a “P,” only it will be a thicker-looking “P,” with the hole in the “P” filled in.
The name Pandora, which has often been in all capital letters on the company’s website and offices, is now in a new, lowercase font, too. Or, as Pandora says, “Our new look embraces the dynamic range of sound and color, visualizing the energy and emotion that artists pour into the creation of music, and that we feel as listeners.”
You can visualize that energy by checking out Pandora’s new branding strategy on the company’s blog.
PC or Not PC: Technology research firm Gartner released its latest figures on PC sales, and the market continues to decline.
Gartner said worldwide PC shipments in the third quarter fell 5.7 percent from a year ago to 68.9 million units. It was the eighth-straight quarter of year-over-year declines in PC shipments, a fact that Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said was mostly attributable to “two fundamental issues that have impacted PC market results: the extension of the lifetime of the PC caused by the excess of consumer devices, and weak PC consumer demand in emerging markets.”
Lenovo remained the world’s No. 1 PC company, with shipments of 14.4 million units, while HP took second place, with 14.06 million shipments during the third quarter.
Bottom of the Lineup:
Here’s a look at how some leading Silicon Valley stocks did Wednesday …
Movin’ On Up: Gains came from Barracuda Networks, Coupa Software, Solar City, Aviat Networks and Accuray.
In the Red: Decliners included Fortinet, Ubiquiti Networks, Nanometrics, Genomic Health and GoPro.
The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite Index slipped by 0.2 percent to 5,239.02.
The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.1 percent to 18,144.20.
And the broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500 Index edged up by 0.1 percent to 2,139.18.
Quote of the Day: “It happened so fast. I don’t think the situation hit me until the inning was over.” — San Francisco Giants third baseman Conor Gillaspie, after the Giants blew a 5-2 lead over the Chicago Cubs in the ninth inning of Tuesday night’s Game 4 of the National League Division Series. As everyone knows by now, the Cubs scored four times to win, 6-5.
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