Pandora: The Music Genome Project is in trouble.
Pandora, the internet radio station built around your tastes, will probably be going out of business soon. After getting slapped by the CRB with exorbitantly high royalty rates to continue playing music, founder Tim Westergren says the company is facing a “pull-the-plug” situation. There’s one congressman trying to help Pandora and it’s million plus users, but the service is bleeding money in the meantime and its future looks grim. I’ll be very sad to see it go, since being reintroduced to it recently through their excellent iPhone app. What great idea do you have for us next, RIAA?
That’s too bad. I’m not sure how Pandora makes money in the first place, but I’ve really enjoyed its service over the years. For those of you not familiar, the general idea is that you set up a play list and Pandora purports to identify traits of the music or artists you select and plays other music with those traits. I love having it on in the office when I have a lot of writing to do.
More from Slashdot:
Internet radio stations apparently have to pay higher royalties than other radio stations.
“We’re funded by venture capital. They’re not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken.” The article estimates that XM Satellite Radio will pay “about 1.6 cents per hour per listener when the new rates are fully adapted in 2010. By contrast, Web radio outlets will pay 2.91 cents per hour per listener.”
This really, really, ticks me off. I’m a huge Pandora fan, and have even taken to plugging my iphone into some powered speakers before bed and listening to pandora in my bedroom.
It’s outrageous that they can’t work out a deal. I would pay a small subscription fee even ($5 a month?) if I could keep getting the service.
Shameful how greed and fear of copyright infringement can ruin a great thing.
Not just ruin a good thing, but cut off their noses to spite their faces. I use Pandora all the time, specifically to find new music, which I then purchase. No Pandora will mean less money for the greedy RIAA. It will also mean less money for the artists, but I don’t imagine the RIAA cares about that.
Yup, for example, I bought some music from the Dropkick Murphys recently because I heard them on Pandora.
What a shame. I also hear music from unfamiliar artists which I then purchase. Now how am I (we) going to ever hear about them?
College stations have been affected greatly by this. It’s hard for them, because the accounting is a nightmare, by virtue of playing so much variety. They might not repeat the same song over the course of a week! Commercial stations have a set list of 15 songs, in some cases. Bland radio, but easy accounting.
Then there’s the cost. As non-profit/non-commercial entities, college stations can’t afford the royalties any better than Pandora. Less, even. Many stations have for years not been online, because it’s enough for them to come up with the royalties for on-air broadcasts, but the royalties for online streaming are even higher. They just make the rational decision to become a community station only.
RIAA has been a desperate outfit for years. There isn’t a ‘next Beatles’ thanks to the dispersion of music online, both in listening and retailing. They haven’t figured out that they are indeed cutting off the nose to spite the face. I sometimes think RIAA would be thrilled with a return to “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair”.
While I hate to see Pandora go, hopefully this will be the spark of the revolution. Not the guns and blood kind, but true artists bucking the RIAA and going on their own.
What someone who has money to invest should do (I don’t) would be to buy Pandora’s genome and match it to non-RIAA artists. Saying “If you like Dropkick Murphys (and you should, cause they beat a**), you’ll like XYZ band”. Pandora already has the research and the fan base, now all the need are the non-RIAA musicans.
Maybe, just maybe, some modern artists will even break their ties to the RIAA. Remember that the artists are the ones who chose to go with them, and we choose to support them when we buy their stuff. Time to break the cycle.
I meant to say “popular” instead of modern. Curses to the non-existant edit button!