The pioneering US-based Pandora Internet Radio service has released its Q3 financials that show a decline in listenership and a whopping US$250M net loss for the first nine months of the year.

The quarter-billion dollar loss is huge, but pure music streaming platform Spotify lost close to $200M last year and well in excess of a half-billion dollars between 2012 and 2015.

One estimate combining the red ink accumulated by SoundCloud, Deezer, Tidal and Pandora puts the total for the fiscal year at over $1B. Unknown is the amount of red ink accumulated by Apple Music, Google Play Music, Amazon Prime Music and YouTube.

While the streaming revenues for artists, music publishers and record labels are increasing, the stability of the income providers themselves remains a murky patch indeed.