Technologizer » Pandora

Pandora: Now With HTML5

Harry McCracken — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:08:42 +0000

Pandora’s upcoming new browser-based version–which dumps Flash for a pure HTML5 experience–sounds neat.

Pandora Will Live On, At a Price

Jared Newman — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:44:40 +0000

With the music industry demanding ever-higher royalty rates for online radio, Pandora’s future has been in jeopardy for some time, but now it seems a workable deal has been struck.

The station is “finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates,” Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told TechCrunch today. SoundExchange, which collects royalties for rights holders, agreed to a 40 percent to 50 percent reduction in per-song-per-listener rates in exchange for 25 percent of Pandora’s revenue, through 2015.

Notably, that deal is good for other Internet radio stations, so Last.fm and Slacker could also benefit from the agreement.

Some users will end up paying for this change. Anyone who listens to Pandora for more than 40 hours in a given month — that’s roughly a tenth of the user base, says TechCrunch — will have to pay $0.99 cents to keep listening. The premium Pandora One service won’t be subject to the additional charge.

Given that Pandora can get a little repetitive after extended listening, the 40-hour cap is a small concession to make, and even then, a dollar ain’t much. Besides, my sense from other Pandora users is that they’re so enthralled with the concept that tiny trade-offs don’t bother them. Little reminders to click on the player window and an occasional ad are minor inconveniences, well-traded for a virtual DJ that knows all about your musical preferences.

Pandora Goes Set-top With Livio Radio

Ed Oswald — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:00:43 +0000

Up until now, Pandora was pretty much exclusively an computer-based product. While the company moved past the PC with the launch of its iPhone application, not until now has it been available in a more traditional form.

Enter Livio Radio. Along with being able to receive about 11,000 Internet radio stations, it is the first Internet radio device to be fully compatible with Pandora. It even features the “thumbs up, thumbs down” rating system the service uses, both on the device itself and the remote.

Users can use their own Pandora account with Livio, and a Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection is required. The device is now available at will retail for $149.99.

Getting Pandora off the PC is something the company has apparently been considering for awhile, considering off-PC use is on the rise. “We’re always looking for new products that make that easy to do, and have a wide appeal for listeners,” business development chief Jessica Steel said.

I’m certainly excited to see Pandora making a move outside the box (although I guess it’s inside the box this time? I digress). For those of us that listen to a lot of Internet radio, myself included, devices like Livio are useful.

The price though is a little steep. I’d personally like to actually see it to judge whether the quality — construction and sound — is worth $150. I’m not seeing any retail availability yet, however.

Pandora Placing Ads in Audio Streams

Ed Oswald — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:20:33 +0000

With Pandora’s struggle to stay afloat in the news a lot lately, the idea that ads may make their way into its streams did not seem such an impossibility. While it was nice to listen to the company’s offerings free of advertisement, Pandora has come dangerously close several times to shutting down simply because it was running out of money.

Venture capital, especially in this economy, is only going to get you so far.

The ads at least for now are not that intrusive. They are 15-seconds in length, and are used sporadically. Chief exec Tim Westergren says they have actually been around for quite awhile, although in recent days their use has become much more widespread.

The ads only appear in the desktop stream, but ads for the mobile stream are in the works. It may be a good idea: for whatever reason, click-through rates are higher in Pandora’s mobile applications, the company says. They will be targeted based on a user’s profile.

Westergren seems to be trying to deny this has anything to do with its ongoing issues over royalty rates, which I have a hard time believing. If you know you’re going to be paying more for something, you’re going to try to make more more money to recoup your losses. That’s just common sense.

Looks Like Pandora Could Stuff Doom Back Into the Box

Harry McCracken — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 03:51:11 +0000

Don’t declare victory just yet, but Pandora, the really cool, wildly popular online music streaming service, may avoid being driven out of business by dramatically higher licensing fees. The House of Representatives has unanimously passed the Webcaster Settlement Bill, which gives online music services such as Pandora more time to work out a deal with the music industry. It’s now headed for the Senate, where its chances of passing look just fine.

Pandora has done a good job of rallying its legions of fans to support it–I got the following e-mail (after the jump) today from Tim Westergren, the company’s founder:

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora;

Today, thanks to the extraordinary support of many Pandora listeners, we took a giant step forward when the House of Representatives supported Pandora and Internet radio and passed the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008. Now we need your help so that the Senate will pass it also – and quickly… The finish line is in sight!

After a yearlong negotiation, Pandora, SoundExchange and the RIAA are finally optimistic about reaching an agreement on royalties that would save Pandora and Internet radio. The legislation would give us the extra time we need to finalize the deal.

Please call your Senators Monday morning starting at 9:00 (Eastern) and ask them to support the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008.

The person who answers the phone in your Senator’s office may ask for the bill number – it’s H.R. 7084 (if they ask for a Senate bill number, you can assure them that in this unusual case, the Senate is actually voting on the House bill number).

Senator Barbara Boxer: (202) 224-3553

Senator Dianne Feinstein: (202) 224-3841

If the phone is busy, please try again until you get through. These calls really do make a difference.

Thanks so much for you ongoing support.

Tim

I don’t pretend to understand the Byzantine world of music rights and licensing. (Side note: When I met with the Slacker folks recently, they told me they’d struck their own deals with music companies and therefore weren’t at risk of being run out of business by the rise in standard licensing fees–I’m not entirely clear on why Pandora couldn’t do something similar.)

But it seems unthinkable that we would end up with licensing costs so high that it’s simply impossible for Web-based radio to work econmically, when licensing fees that online stations could afford would put money in the music industry’s pockets. The folks who own music couldn’t be so pigheaded as to destroy the future of radio, right?

Um, right?

Good Grief, Are Even Our Clipboards Not Sacrosanct?

Harry McCracken — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:12:57 +0000

Here’s a good computing rule of thumb: If you discover a mysterious link in your Clipboard for a piece of security software you’ve never heard of, DON’T CLICK ON THE LINK AND BUY THE SOFTWARE!

Clipboards Under Attack
The BBC has an alarming story about a piece of malware that apparently uses a vulnerability in Flash to insert a link into the Clipboard of Firefox users on both Windows and Mac computers. The link leads to a site hawking fake security software, and the Beeb says it’s difficult to get rid of (although it also seems to say that rebooting your computer or killing the browser thread will remove it, which doesn’t sound that onerous). It all sounds annoying rather than dangerous, but it sounds really annoying, like finding a grifter hawking fake Rolexes in your living room, and having trouble getting rid of him. And it attacks Flash, Firefox, and Macs, three platforms I don’t associate with major security headaches.

Read more at: BBC

Pandora We Hardly Knew Ye?
The CEO of Pandora, the wonderful personalized music service that’s a hit on the Web and even neater as an iPhone service, says that the new, much higher royalty rates for Internet radio stations may drive it out of business soon. That would be tremendously sad. And wile I’m all for music owners getting paid–and even for them being allowed to make dumb, self-defeating business decisions–I haven’t heard anyone explain how it can be good for anyone involved if the royalty rates are set so high that nobody can afford to pay them.

Read more at: Ars Technica, Washington Post

Cloud Computing: It’s For Everybody
The Patent Office has denied Dell’s attempt to trademark the phrase “Cloud Computing.” I was going to say that comes as no surprise given the generic nature of the phrase, but that hasn’t stopped the patent office before–I’m old enough to remember when “Windows” was a generic term used when discussing graphical interfaces, not a Microsoft trademark. I’m glad that Dell failed here and mystified why they tried in the first place…and I’ll be happiest of all when this currently buzzy phrase isn’t quite as overused as it is at the moment.

Read more at: The Industry Standard, The Register

Firefox vs. IE, Part MMMMCMXCIX
I’m a sucker for anything that discusses the relative market share of Firefox and Internet Explorer, such as a new blog post at CNET that comes to the (pretty obvious) conclusion that Internet Explorer usage goes down as the technical sophistication of a Web site’s audience goes up. I’ll take the opportunity to give an update of browser usage on Technologizer: In the site’s short life to date, 46 percent of visitors have used Firefox, 26 percent have used Safari, and IE is in third place with 22 percent. Operating systems? 54 percent of folks used Windows, and 38 percent used the Mac–and five percent used an iPhone (!). My stats are unquestionably skewed by the current popularity of my comparisons of Mac and PC prices, but it’s still great to see so much diversity.

Read more at: CNET

Steve Jobs, Customer Service Rep
Over at MacRumors, there’s a piece on an iPhone 3G user who supposedly pinged Steve Jobs about the iPhone’s connectivity glitches and got a brief response from the man himself, saying that two percent of iPhones are impacted and that Apple hopes to get a fix out quickly. I don’t know if the story is true, but there have been plenty of apparent instances of Jobs responding to e-mail from Apple customers before. I’m impressed that he finds the time…and also fascinated by the idea of so many people with questions or comments about Apple products deciding to take them right to the top.

Read more at: MacRumors.com

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