Pandora users create over 1.6 billion stations in 2012

PanARMENIAN.Net - Pandora users created over 1.6 billion stations over the course of 2012, and listened to over 1 million different songs by over 100,000 different artists. All that added up to an astounding 13 billion hours of songs listened to throughout the year by a pretty amazing amount of people — 10,000 of the artists who have songs on Pandora had more than 25,000 unique listeners, Mashable reports.

"When we created the Music Genome Project thirteen years ago, we had a dual purpose: connect people with music they love and help talented artists find their audiences," Pandora CEO Tim Westergren said in a blog post announcing the numbers. "We knew if we could get the first part right, the second would naturally follow."

This year Pandora faced scrutiny from those artists, who claimed the company wasn't appropriately compensating them for their work. In response, Pandora detailed the compensation for several artists who are highly compensated on the service. For instance, Pandora claims that Lil' Wayne has made almost $3 million.

A big part of Pandora's growth is the service's integration into other devices and services, allowing people to connect with their favorite music almost anywhere.

Pandora was available in more than 1,000 different devices — at this year's CES, the most common of those devices being mobile gadgets.

125 million of Pandora's users have listened to tunes on the service using a smartphone or tablet. Pandora is available for the iPhone, Android devices, and things like the Barnes & Noble's Nook and the Amazon Kindle.

Not just for phones and tablets, Pandora also comes standard in a number of major automobiles, and is available in more than 760 consumer electronics devices ranging from Blu-ray players to a refrigerator made by Samsung.