Pandora CFO Mike Herring says his company and Apple have a “frenemy kind of relationship going on” with Apple poised to enter the streaming music market, Fox Business reports. The report also notes that “one can expect” Pandora will be integrated into Apple Watch, and Herring said “we’ll definitely be in CarPlay.” While Pandora and Apple have a close partnership — “We were part of what made it fun to have an iPhone,” Herring said — Apple’s development of a streaming music service comes at a time when Pandora’s share price has dropped over uncertainties about royalty rates paid to artists.
Herring admits that if royalties go much higher than the current $0.0014 per song, Pandora would have a hard time staying profitable. Even though Pandora is still at the top of the streaming heap with 81 million monthly active users, Apple siphoning off a significant portion of that number would further strain the already struggling company.
But since Pandora still owes much of its success to the popular iPhone app, Herring said it’s a “very interesting relationship.”
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