As the New York Times reports, John Simson, the executive director of SoundExchange, still argues that the original rates would have been "appropriate and fair," but he admits that these new rates will give "webcasters the opportunity to flesh out various business models and the creators of music the opportunity to share in the success their recordings generate."

Tim Westgren, Pandora's founder, points out that this is not an ideal solution, but that this deal "still represents a thoughtful and reasoned outcome under the circumstances."

Some Changes for Pandora

At least for Pandora, however, this will also mean that a small number of users who stream more than 40 hours of music per month will have to pay 0.99$ if they want to hear more music on Pandora during that month. Pandora says this will only affect about 10% of its user base and those users, of course, could also upgrade to Pandora's desktop player, Pandora One.

The service now also shows display ads on its website, which, to be honest, don't seem to fit into the general design of the site and look like they were just added for the sake of it.

In the Bloomberg interview, Westergreen also acknowledged that Pandora's struggle with the music industry to negotiate royalty rates could still stop the company from becoming profitable, though Westergreen also said that he is optimistic that these negotiations will come to a positive conclusion for Pandora.

last.fm 32% (207 votes)
Pandora 30% (197 votes)
Yahoo Music 9% (61 votes)
iTunes Music Service 8% (52 votes)
Rhapsody 4% (27 votes)

Note that FineTune and Live365 were added late to the poll, but both have more votes currently than AOL, MSN and Zune. There's still time to cast your vote though, so please do so in the poll below:

"...[the hackers] have been hard at work building plug-ins and workarounds to add lots of new functionality. In fact, so much progress has been made, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Apple purposely left the door unlocked, perhaps to learn from these early adopters about what future direction the product should take."

Steve reviews an RSS reader for AppleTV, Sports Scores (a simple plug-in to display sports results), an Internet Radio plug-in, a YouTube plug-in, and more.

"At yesterday's announcement, the company unveiled two new partnerships: Sonos for streaming Pandora around the home, and Sprint for mobile. Both the mobile and home streaming versions fully integrate with Pandora on the web, so for example, everything you create, rate or bookmark on your phone, also appears the next time you're back on the web, and vice versa."

Check out these stories and others on last100. We'll be regularly highlighting the best Web-related last100 posts here on R/WW.

For those who don't know, Pandora has been facing closure due to being hit with outrageous fees by a federal panel. Now Westergren is sending a plea to listeners of Pandora for their support.

Update: The House has passed the Webcaster Settlement Act. Please see Pandora Lives a Little Longer, House Passes Webcaster Act for an update on this story.

Yesterday Westergren posted his "call of arms" to the Pandora blog:

"After a yearlong negotiation, Pandora, artists and record companies are finally optimistic about reaching an agreement on royalties that would save Pandora and Internet radio. But just as we've gotten close, large traditional broadcast radio companies have launched a covert lobbying campaign to sabotage our progress.

Yesterday, Congressman Jay Inslee, and several co-sponsors, introduced legislation to give us the extra time we need but the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), which represents radio broadcasters such as Clear Channel, has begun intensively pressuring lawmakers to kill the bill. We have just a day or two to keep this from collapsing.

This is a blatant attempt by large radio companies to suffocate the webcasting industry that is just beginning to offer an alternative to their monopoly of the airwaves.

Please call your Congressperson right now and ask them to support H.R. 7084, the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008 - and to not capitulate to pressure from the NAB. Congress is currently working extended hours, so even calls this evening and over the weekend should get answered."

Support the Cause, Act Now!

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we're huge fans of Pandora. We'd hate to see the service make our list of apps that we miss. We're asking our readers for their help in saving Pandora. Please call the central congressional switchboard at (202) 225 3121 or look up your state's House Representative and plead with them to support H.R. 7084. This will allow Pandora and all respective parties to have more time to make the necessary changes that could keep Pandora alive. Support the cause to keep this awesome service going.

Founder Tim Westergren has stated that the service is approaching a "pull-the-plug kind of decision" for the service. Why is this happening? Last year, web radio giants were hit with outrageously ridiculous fees by a federal panel for every song that would be played on their stations. This caused a lot of services to either shutdown, or go through what Pandora has been experiencing for the past year. In doing so, it seems the financial problems the music industry has set out to create in order to win the constant battle between rights, piracy, and copyrighted music, are working.

Last Stand, Last Chance

Pandora's founder is waiting for a ray of light in a fight being led by Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.). Berman is attempting to arrange a few last-minute deals between web radio stations and SoundExchange, the organization that represents artists and record companies that would reduce the the recent fees. However, Westergren isn't going to hold his breath for too long, stating that, "The moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved, we have to pull the plug because all we're doing is wasting money." We don't blame you Tim.

What Will You Do?

There are plenty of petitions floating around the web to help the cause, but the law is the law and petitions may not help matters in this situation. We'd be saddened to see Pandora close its doors. While services like Last.FM aren't showing any of the same signs, we wonder if the same fate may be in the not-so-distant future for our other favorite music services. If it is, what will you do?

We don't know the full details of the issue, but as an innovative web service that we appreciate and have covered a few times before, we thought we'd share Tim Westergren's concerns with you. If you agree with Tim, by all means sign his petition. See also Gizmodo's article on this issue. Here is the letter in its entirety:

I'm writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.

Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential.

I hope you'll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder) "

Overall, Slacker feels a lot like satellite radio, which is probably no surprise, given that XM Radio's co-founder Lon Levin is Slacker's Senior Advisor.

With regards to its user interface, every Pandora and Last.fm user will feel right at home. One nice addition to Slacker, though, is the ability to see which songs will play next.

Customization

One advantage of Slacker over its competitors is that it gives you more options to directly customize your stations. You can direct it to play songs from different decades, and decide if you want it to mostly play hits or also more obscure songs.

Competition

Slacker's reviews and biographies can't quite compete with the depth of information offered by the Last.fm app, which can also display tour dates. Slacker also doesn't feature any of the social networking functions that have made Last.fm so popular.

Just like its competitors, Slacker only allows you to skip six songs per station every hour. Unlike Pandora and Last.fm, however, Slacker does play 30 second radio ads after every fifth song. For $3.99 a month, however, you can buy a premium membership that lets you skip songs as often as you want and which removes the advertising from your stream.

Like all the other streaming music apps on the iPhone, Slacker can't play in the background while you surf the web or read your email. This, of course, is a limitation that Apple has put on its developers, even though Apple's own music player on the iPhone does this without causing any problems.

Verdict

Even though Slacker Radio is very similar to the Last.fm and Pandora app, we think it is definitely worth a try. Whether you prefer one over the other will depend on how happy you are with the music recommendations it gives and how important the social features of Last.fm are to you.

According to CNet, the NAB dropped their efforts to eliminate the bill after a Saturday night meeting with Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) that addressed some of the groups concerns. They didn't stop their either. The NAB has expressed that they will not oppose the bill when it moves to the Senate. When NAB's efforts stopped, the bill was able to pass unanimously through the House.

While we like to think that Pandora listeners really stepped-up and made a stand for the service by answering Pandora's call to arms, others have noted that,

Two other factors, however, likely played larger roles in getting the bill through the House: the lobbying efforts made by National Public Radio and some 12th-hour deal making to appease traditional radio broadcasters, who were trying to kill the legislation, according to sources.

Is it Enough Time?

While this is a huge success for web radio broadcasters, it's not everlasting. The Act will allow web radio broadcasters to negotiate with the music industry only while Congress is out of session. They have until February 15th to settle upon a new royalty rate. While four months may seem like a long time, we understand how much of a hassle the music industry can be to the world of all things digital. However, Westergren has noted that they are now closer than ever to reaching a rate that everyone can agree with it. Here's to hoping that rate is agreed upon before the end of January.

And in a way that process is a very conducive way to listen to music that you haven't heard before. Just tune in and get on with your life. Soon you will hear a track you really like and think, I have to have this! On a site like Pandora or Last.FM, usually that means going out and buying the track. But since everything on Fresh Hot Radio is born on the Internet, free to download, you simply click on the link provided and get it. Mission accomplished.

We think Fresh Hot Radio hits its design goals perfectly. We've been listening to it for over an hour and the music has been great. If we want to keep a copy of the music, it's just a click away, and the site even has a URL and embed code for each track. We'd say it's the perfect accompaniment to our work day.

At 5pm PST the new Napster will launch with a $5 monthly subscription plan (down from the old $15 plan) and what you get for that price looks quite good. 5 MP3 downloads per month (screenshot shows free credits for an initial 35 MP3s too), free on-demand streaming of more than 7 million songs and additional download purchases for between 69 cents and $1.29. There's a screenshot of the new interface below and our thoughts on where this new version still falls short.

New Interface

That interface looks like what iTunes would have looked like if it was a native Windows app.

The company says it is still working on making mobile a more compelling experience, something we expected to be a big part of the plan when the acquisition happened.

So how does this compare to other music solutions? Here at RWW we use Pandora, Lala and Amazon MP3. Obviously playing particular songs on demand is something Pandora doesn't do, but Pandora nails discovery and the iPhone. It's also free and very easy to use. Lala has a much nicer interface than Napster, it's less expensive but it's also a little confusing. Lala does, however, allow you to listen to new albums all the way through one time for free. Amazon MP3 is just a store, but works well when used in conjunction with Pandora or Lala.

This new Napster seems like a compelling offer but remains an incremental change from everything else the industry offers. Give me a $5 monthly subscription that combines Napster's streaming options with an entire album's worth of monthly MP3 files (5 songs is half an album), the full album previews of Lala, the recommendation and iPhone awesomeness of Pandora and the artist profile quality of Last.fm - and then we're really talking. Though for now, the new Napster seems like a pretty good deal.

After years of work and more than $20 million dollars invested, the company is finally looking at the light of the end of the tunnel: Turning a profit. In this exclusive interview with founder Tim Westergren after a town hall meetup in Richmond, Virginia, we discuss the company's close call with bankruptcy in 2007, their ad-based revenue model, their roadmap for adding new features and an open API, and their incorporation into a variety of hardware devices.

Now, however, the "unwitting nonprofit" is closer than ever to growing revenues larger than their expenses, news the investors will surely be ecstatic to hear.

In addition to recording this one-on-one talk with Westergren, we also captured about 20 uncut minutes of his talk to Richmond fans and users. Watch for the fuller story of Pandora's trials, triumphs, and evolution, including an extended discussion of the utterly unscalable but nevertheless fascinating Music Genome Project.

We'd like your help in predicting what the percentage of Microsoft's share of searches will be by December of 2008 following the integration of Live Search on Facebook. Will it increase or decrease and by how much? Click here to cast your prediction.

• The arrangement was first announced in July and offers a revenue opportunity for both companies
• Microsoft owns a stake in Facebook and has an exclusive agreement with the site for banner ads
• Results vary on Facebook and Live.com because Facebook uses certain filters for their search results

Predicting Pandora's New Royalty Rate

In the past few weeks, Pandora was at the forefront of many headlines. The CEO of Pandora fought hard to win a small victory that would grant Internet radio stations more time to reach a new royalty rate agreement with the powers that be. The cut-off time is February 15, 2009, which is right around the corner. We'd like you to predict whether a new royalty rate agreement will be reached in time and what the new royalty rate will be.

Fast Facts

• Senate approved a bill that says Congress must honor any royalty rate agreement reached
• Webcasters and copyright holders have until February 15th to come up with a deal on their own
• Current royalty rates would cost Pandora $18 million of its estimated $25 million in revenue in 2008

To test each of the above 5 services, I wanted to see if my favorite band - The Velvet Underground - could be found. And if so, did it play similar artists or have some way for me to 'personalize' my music listening experience? After all, personalization is a big part of 'web 2.0'. So here goes...

I use last.fm a lot and one thing it does very well is provide a custom music stream based on an artist. Here are the first 5 songs that came up for VU:

1. Head Held High by The Velvet Underground
2. Havalina by Pixies
3. Beautiful by Smashing Pumpkins
4. Getchoo by Weezer
5. Das Lied Der Deuschen by Nico

All of those songs were to my liking and were an appropriate mix of modern Alt rock and arty pop (the Nico track). In other words, very much in the spirit of VU.

All up, a very solid 4.5/5 for last.fm.

Pandora

Unfortunately I can no longer access Pandora, as I reside outside the US. This is the message I was greeted with today:

"We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S."

So I asked Josh Catone (who lives on the East Coast of the US) to see what The Velvet Underground resulted in on Pandora. He advised:

1. Rock & Roll by The Velvet Underground
2. No Reply by the Beatles
3. Picture Book by The Kinks
4. Tattoo by The Who
5. Lisa Says by The Velvet Underground

That's a nice, diverse selection. Not as contemporary as last.fm though, with all the Pandora selections being from the 60's and 70's. I give last.fm better marks for 'knowing' that the Velvets influenced virtually every Alt rock band of the 80's, 90's and 21st century. Still, music is timeless and the Pandora songs were all excellent too. One other thing: you'd expect more than five songs before another VU song is played.

My rating: 4/5 (I didn't penalise them for not being available outside the US, as it isn't their fault; but not having anything from the 80's onwards loses them .5 of a point).

Yahoo Music

Alas at this point my experiment started to turn to custard. On the Yahoo Music homepage, I selected "Create radio station" - which took me to their LAUNCHcast Radio service. That gave me a long list of artists to choose from. Ignoring that, I went to the bottom of the page and entered VU as my sole option. Unfortunately... I got the following "Error 5":

Not OS X?! I checked out the Help file, which stated: "Currently, we do not support LAUNCHcast Radio for Macintosh or Firefox on Windows."

At which point I gave up on Yahoo Music. Rating: 0/5 for extreme compatibility incompetence.

iTunes Music Service

I opened my iTunes app and clicked 'Radio'. However, there is no way to enter an artist or search for one. It is a straight list of radio stations. A great selection though, so Apple gets points for that. But when you think online radio these days, it's recommendation and personalization services like last.fm and Pandora that are pushing the boundaries.

So my rating for iTunes music streaming: 2.5/5 (basic and comprehensive in music types, but not innovative).

Rhapsody

Rhapsody has a nice "listen FREE" search option at the top of its homepage, an excellent way to entice people to sign up for its premium service. I typed in "The Velvet Underground" and it took me to a useful bio page. At the bottom of that page I saw a link for The Velvet Underground Channel. Licking my lips, I tried to click on it. And again. And again!! But it was non-clickable for me. Why? Because the service is unavailable outside the US.

Such a promising service, but (as with Pandora) it shows what a legal minefield the online music world is currently - due to the record companies. It defeats the purpose of the World Wide Web if people outside the US can't use it. So I'll reluctantly pass on a rating for Rhapsody (and I didn't want to bother Josh a second time).

Conclusion

I also checked out FineTune and Last365, but neither offered much in the way of Velvet Underground personalization. So for me, it's no contest - last.fm wins, mostly because I can actually access it! But also it does deliver slightly better results than Pandora. I used to use Pandora a lot, back when it was available to me; and found then that last.fm was slightly more diverse and less likely to repeat songs. So last.fm has consistently been the leader in music streaming of the web 2.0 variety (i.e. with recommendations and personalization).

I think Apple could be more innovative with iTunes. You only need to look at The Filter, a playlist service we reviewed earlier this week, to see how iTunes data can be personalized.

And for the love of Lou, I hope that Pandora and Rhapsody can route around those damn record companies soon. I do hate it when Web innovation is blocked due to legal issues.

What do you think? Do the above 5 deliver with your favorite band?

Lou Reed pic by ptufts, at Web 2.0 Summit 2006

TuneExplorer was built primarily as a demonstration interface for Veenix's music analysis software, called the SonicLogicEngine. As an interface, it's not terribly exciting (ironic, given where I discovered it) - but hopefully the science behind it can be judged on its own merits. The software goes beyond the BPM analysis of competing services like Tangerine and is ultimately intended for licensing by other, larger services that leverage things like user tags and web data. I liked the results I got from TuneExplorer.

Related work is being done by a number of groups. Sun Labs researcher Paul Lamere, whose Search Inside the Music project purports to combine both tonal and social qualities in organizing music, is one. TheFilter is faster, prettier, more useful and compelling (and available for Windows or Mac) - but I don't know that it really builds similarity- based playlists as accurately. It may be good enough, though. I may use TheFilter more than TuneExplorer, unless TheFilter's playlist recommendations just don't do it for me. TuneExplorer may be the best way to jump in to my collection, create some quick playlists for iTunes and then get back out into iTunes proper, where I'd presumably spend most of my time. On the other hand, TheFilter's recommendations may be "good enough" and made up for by the vastly superior user experience.

Any preference for TheFilter, though, is just speaking as a consumer. The math behind TuneExplorer's SonicLogicEngine may be the more compelling in the long run. That project's consumer facing product is very easy to use and is definitely worth a look.