Popular Internet radio service Pandora is tuning up for an IPO later this year.
In documents filed Friday, Pandora indicated it would raise $100 million with an initial public offering stock. That figure will likely change as bankers gauge the demand to invest in or an 11-year-old company that has helped change the way people listen to music.
A target price for the shares won’t be set until the IPO is closer to happening. The offering probably won’t happen for at least three months.
Pandora’s decision to go public is the latest sign that Internet companies sense the time is ripe to mine the markets for money amid growing excitement about digital media and online networking. Demand Media Inc., an online service that hires freelance writers to go write stories about frequently searched topics, made a big splash with its IPO last month and professional networking service LinkedIn Corp. filed its IPO papers last week.
In the past few days, AOL Inc. agreed to buy online news and opinion service Huffington Post for $315 million and The Wall Street Journal reported that online messaging service Twitter may now be worth $8 billion to $10 billion. Online coupon service Groupon Inc. is expected to go public later this year and Facebook — the most prized of all privately held Internet companies with a market value recently pegged at $50 billion — may file its IPO papers next year.
Given the growing fervor for widely used Internet services, it makes sense for Pandora to make the IPO leap now, said Inside Digital Media analyst Phil Leigh. “It’s kind of like nuclear fission; we’re seeing a chain reaction of these things,” he said.
Pandora Media Inc. started out in 2000 as a music recommendation service called Savage Beast Technologies. It changed its name in 2005 when it launched an…