NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess) — Liberty Media-backed SiriusXM has renewed talks to acquire streaming music service Pandora, the New York Post reported.
While there was no agreement on a potential price for Pandora, the Post quoted one unnamed source who stated the bid as high as $12 to $13 a share, which while sounding optimistic, would put Pandora's value at approximately $2.88bn.
The renewed talks come after Pandora rejected an offer from Liberty Media last July, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, came in at $15 per share.
After a series of acquisition talks, including a failed bid by Liberty last summer, Pandora, run by founder Tim Westergren, had positioned itself as an active competitor in the burgeoning streaming music market. However, activist investors, including Matrix and Corvex have pushed the company towards a sale, the Post reported.
“Given the high level of shareholder involvement and what we see as significant strategic value in Pandora’s user base, advertising inventory, data, and home screen position, we believe the likelihood of strategic action remains high,” Goldman Sachs analyst Heath Terry wrote in a report on Pandora released this week and quoted by Barron's.
Pandora's April launch of a premium edition of their service likely only fueled the fire of those activist investors. As reported by Hypebot, the company revealed in a recent round of investment from KKR that just 500,000 customers had signed up for a free trial of the premium service, representing just 00.67% of Pandora's 76.7 million active users. As well, active listeners on the service slipped by 2.7 Million in the first quarter of 2017, down to 76.7 million, compared to 79.4 million for Q1 2016. – Staff Writers
