As a marketer, I've been steering clients toward Pandora for around 2 years. I've seen great success using their various platforms for ad placement. Not to mention, I've been a loyal Pandora subscriber for around the same amount of time. With that said, iHeartRadio owned by Clear Channel has been banging down the door of this streaming music juggernaut. I recently switched to their service and am extremely impressed by what I've seen thus far. Clear Channel has a definite winner on their hands with this one.

Today, I pitched their service and ad placement potential for the first time and explained why iHeartRadio is such a smart place to put our customers Ad dollars. First, to be fair, let's look at them side by side and do a little comparative analysis. I think you'll quickly see why iHeart deserves the new top spot.

Pandora has a user base of approximately 100,000,000 users and a music library of around 900,000 songs. Their platforms include a website as well as mobile and tablet apps.  Up until now, they've been the one to catch. While not necessarily first to market in terms of streaming music, (think of the now defunct iMeem service which was acquired by Myspace when they attempted to rebrand themselves as a social music network) their service enjoyed rapid engagement and was quickly embraced by practically everyone with broadband and a set of headphones.

Enter iHeartRadio, a website with a practically identical offering, but some serious marketing muscle behind it. Owned by Clear Channel, a well established Radio Giant with over 800 stations under it's belt in 150 markets worldwide. With over 275,000,000 users and a library of over 11,000,000 songs, they dwarf Pandora in many ways. One way is how many of the local radio stations that I already listen to are streaming their playlists through iHeartRadio. 

Pandora has been around for over a decade and their platform is excellent, flat out. But then again, so is iHeartRadio. If I was walking the halls of Pandora, I'd be pretty uneasy knowing that the same listeners I'm vying for have an alternative this good out there. Maybe that's why Pandora recently rolled out a completely HTML5 retooled interface after only 7 years with the same look and feel. Could be they're feeling the pressure of emerging Spotify, Last.fm and iHeart, which would explain why their stock has taken such a wallop. One thing is for sure, these new kids on the block have definitely taken listeners away from Pandora and they probably won't be back anytime soon. Can you blame me for tub thumping iHeart?