pandora - ReadWriteWeb

More Songs Doesn't Make Raditaz Better Than Pandora [UPDATED]

Dave Copeland — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:30:00 -0800

If you've spent more than a few tracks worth of time playing with Pandora, you know that you can't access every song or even every artist you may be into. You can find plenty of music by the Pixies, for example, but another favorite from my college days, Liz Phair, is nowhere to be found on the service.

Raditaz launched earlier this month with promises 14 million licensed tracks, compared to the "more than 900,000" currently offered by Pandora. But guess what?

Still no Liz Phair. And now, seemingly, no Pixies either.

]]> I spent the weekend playing with Raditaz and comparing it to Pandora, which I have been a fan of for close to a year. Neither service compares to the ease of hearing what you want, when you want in a way that Spotify does. But Pandora and Raditaz are both easily accessible on the Web and on mobile phones (Spotify requires the download of a desktop app), and both Pandora and Raditaz promise to help you discover new music based on your preferences and how you rate the songs you listen to.

Update: Raditaz spokesman Tom Brophy emailed to say that the lack of Pixies tunes was because of a "snafu" with Warner Music and that it should be resolved in about a week. And the service does, in fact, have those Liz Phair songs I can't get on Pandora.

"I actually will admit that you made some fair points," Brophy said in an email. "We are in the process of significantly upgrading the platform, and in particular, the algorithm that powers Raditaz stations. Our upgrade should be completed in approximately 30 days. We are also doing some work on better integrating Likes and Dislikes."

Why Pandora Is Better

In my tests, Raditaz loaded slower than Pandora.

Overall, in fact, the Raditaz interface was rather ugly and not nearly as intuitive as Pandora. Like the music I listened to, of course, the latter is a matter of personal opinion. But Pandora does have some objective pluses, including lyrics for many of the songs, as well as artist bios.

Beyond that, I felt that Pandora did a better job of finding music I like based on my rankings. When I gave a "thumbs down" on Raditaz for a Cake song, Raditaz immediately loaded another Cake song. Substitutions for artists not on the service was also weak: I was given Sheryl Crow and Kate Bush when I set up a station based on Liz Phair. At least Pandora gives me slightly better substitutes, including Lily Allen and the Cowboy Junkies as options similar to Liz Phair.

I may be imagining this, but I also felt that, overtime, Pandora is much quicker about learning what I like and don't like and turning me on to new artists. After spending several hours listening to Raditaz, I can't say I've found any new music that I like: that just doesn't happen when I spend the same amount of time listening to Pandora.

Why Raditaz Is Better

Beyond its promise of more songs, Raditaz also promises no audio ads (both sites have ads on their Web interface; Pandora also plays an audio ad every few songs).

Raditaz also geo-locates listeners to create "most popular" by location lists - something I frankly could live without. So far, the geo-location seems more about targeting ads than it is about improving listener experience.

And perhaps its biggest sell is that, unlike Pandora, you can skip through as many tracks as you want. Pandora, because of its licensing agreements, only lets you skip through so many songs in any given listening session.

Then again, unlimited skips is something I really needed to make it through my test of Raditaz since it missed so frequently in trying to match me up with music I actually wanted to listen to.

]]> Discuss

Not Every App Is Joining Facebook's Oversharing World

Alicia Eler — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:15:00 -0800

Spotify was essential to Facebook's frictionless sharing plan. But not every app is down for cluttering news feeds with moment-to-moment information about what its users are doing, saying, thinking and listening to.

Music streaming service Pandora, for one, is staying out of Facebook's social apps completely. "It's true that music is a social experience, but it's also a very private experience," Pandora founder Tim Westergren recently told CNN. "We have to be very cautious."

]]> Yesterday, Facebook announced 60 new social apps for Timeline, which aim to "enhance" users' timelines with apps that "help you tell your story, whether you love to cook, eat, travel, run, or review movies."

Some of the new social apps include food-photo app Foodspotting, recipe app Foodily, ticket-buying app Ticketmaster, the visually oriented social network Pinterest, movie-reviewing site Rotten Tomatoes, and travel site TripAdvisor.

The open graph push officially happened on Wednesday, but news made its way around the tech news world on Tuesday.

At f8 last year, Zuckerberg laid out the future of social apps: "We think that people are going to want to share all kinds of things with their lives and we think that apps are the way they want to show them."

Because, believes Zuckerberg, "no activity is too big or small to share."

Not everyone agrees. Not all information is public, and it's up to the user to decide what they feel comfortable "sharing," opting-out if necessary. Our own John Paul Titlow turned off his Facebook Spotify integration months ago.

Listening to music alone, either on a jog or just laying in bed, is one of those meditative experiences. So is reading articles that are longer than 500 words. Instapaper is one avenue for that long-form reading experience. Users can, of course, share the stories they've instapaper'ed out to Facebook and Twitter. But would Instapaper ever consider a Facebook social app?

"I don't believe that people want to auto-share everything they read without some other manual filter in front of it," replies Instapaper founder Marco Arment.

]]> Discuss

Hands-On With the New Spotify Radio: Look Out, Pandora

John Paul Titlow — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:15:47 -0800

Normally when a tech company launches a product or feature that's billed as a potential "killer" of a popular incumbent, there's cause to be skeptical. Quite often, that's just unsubstantiated hype either on the part of the company itself or tech writers.

In the case of Spotify's new Web radio feature, we're not going to go so far as to say that it's a "Pandora killer," but its inclusion in Spotify's desktop client is going to give the up-and-coming streaming service a tangible advantage over the 11-year-old Web radio service.

]]> Music recommendation engines can be a tricky nut to crack. Last.fm combines your listening history with that of many other people, and it does a pretty good job of relating songs and artists to one another. Pandora uses a more complex algorithm based on specific musical qualities such as tempo, tonality and even things as granular as the level of distortion applied to the lead guitar. The Echo Nest, which has a much bigger data set and powers dozens of music apps, uses an even more automated approach involving data-mining, acoustic analysis and machine learning.

The recommendations offered up by Spotify Radio are not quite as good as those on Last.fm or Pandora in many cases, but they're pretty solid and the feature has serious potential. We started stations based on a handful of artists across genres and time periods and found the results to be mostly appropriate without being too broad or overly obvious. We even tried a handful lesser known artists from a few decades ago and Spotify was able to rattle off sonically similar tracks.

The feature definitely has its limitations. For one, that stations based on an individual songs (rather than artists) seem limited. Those channels appear to operate as though you'd selected the artist, not the song. By contrast, when you put a specific track into Pandora, it looks for songs with similar aural qualities regardless of genre, time period or other broad characteristics. It does a pretty effective job of pairing up songs that actually sound similar. And if you don't agree, you can always hit the thumbs down button.

The experience certainly varies depending on what you enter. While many stations returned appropriate-sounding results, a station for the band Nirvana mostly brought up other well-known rock songs from the same era, including a slow, cheesy ballad by Aerosmith.

Spotify hasn't divulged what's fueling their recommendations, but it does feel pretty similar to results from The Echo Nest, which powers a number of music apps, including Clear Channel's Pandora cline, iHeartRadio. UPDATE: It is indeed the Echo Nest that's powering Spotify Radio, both companies have confirmed. The recommendation engine has some growing to do before it's a thoroughly viable alternative to Pandora. Still, the mere addition of such a feature to Spotify will make many users that much less prone to load up Pandora.

Spotify Radio is just the latest way users of the streaming service can discover new music. The company recently unveiled a platform for third party apps, included editorially curated selections from Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, as well as more automated recommendations from Last.fm. The app platform and the new radio feature will both be rolled out shortly to desktop users, but you can download a preview here.

]]> Discuss

Ten Years Later, Napster is Dead and Digital Music is Thriving Regardless

John Paul Titlow — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:20:16 -0800

I'll never forget when I first discovered Napster. I was in high school and had heard about it from a friend. As an avid music fan, I was delighted to suddenly find myself with access to a seemingly limitless trove of songs, some of which were previously available only on $40 CD-R bootlegs in the back of record shops where they also sold paraphernalia strictly designed for smoking tobacco and only tobacco.

I never abandoned purchasing music all together, but the MP3 struck me as a far more convenient format than the compact disc, and Napster gave me quick and easy access to a world of MP3's. When Radiohead's "Kid A" showed up on Napster weeks before the CD was available in stores, what was I supposed to do? Ignore it?

]]> Before long, a national controversy erupted around Napster because its approach to peer-to-peer file-sharing was, as we all knew in our hearts, not quite legally sound. Efforts by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) succeeded in having Napster shut down in 2001, the same year that Apple introduced its own MP3 player, the iPod.

The Napster brand lived on for years to come, having been converted to a pay subscription music service. Unsurprisingly, it never quite returned to the levels of popularity it saw in 1999, as new digital music services popped up left and right. Most recently, the company was purchased by one of those services, Rhapsody. Today, Napster will officially be absorbed into the Rhapsody brand and even that iconic, headphone-wearing logo, once a symbol a generation's digital defiance, will cease to be used.

Ten Years After Napster, Digital Music is Still Evolving

As we head toward 2012, the digital music landscape looks very different, and in fact is still evolving into something that works well for fans, music labels and artists alike. The record industry as we once knew it may never return, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Today, people can record multi-track demos on the tiny computers they carry in their pockets and produce complete, studio-quality tracks on their laptops later. Once everything is mixed and mastered, they can publish it online audience at little to no cost.

Naturally, DIY artists who get started on the Internet don't have quite the reach of a record label, but many musicians have launched their careers online and some established artists have relied on the Web in lieu of the record labels that once supported them.

Consuming Music is Even Easier Without Napster

As far as consuming music, it's never been easier. Just as one used to be able to find new albums on Napster or LimeWire within days of their release, most major label and indie releases are available on Spotify, Rdio or MOG pretty much right away. If not, you can try Grooveshark, as long as it's still around, anyway. If those freemium streaming sites don't have what you're looking for, Apple, Google and Amazon all have massive MP3 stores with cloud-based storage services alongside them.

In addition to being legal, today's digital music services go beyond the desktop and are readily available on our smartphones, those little gadgets could have hardly imagined a decade ago. They're even starting to get integrated into smart TVs, cars and a growing number of household appliances.

For a more serendipitous listening experience, there's personalized Internet radio services like Pandora, Last.fm and Slacker Music. If you prefer human recommendations over algorithms, services like Shuffler.com scan hundreds of popular music blogs and build genre-based, curated music stations, even on the iPad. You can even listen to others DJ their own setlists in real time using services like Turntable.fm or one of its many copycats.

Of course, if none of these options give you what you're looking forward, less-than-legal means to acquire music still exist, but you didn't hear it from us.

]]> Discuss

Pandora Relaunches Site in HTML5, Removes Music Listening Cap

John Paul Titlow — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 07:24:56 -0800

Pandora, the customized Internet radio streaming service, has pushed out a redesigned interface to all users. The new UI comes with an added bonus: the company has removed its infamous 40 hour listening cap, enabling users to streaming an unlimited amount of music for free.

The Web interface for the popular music service has been totally overhauled, offering a sleeker, cleaner design with simplified controls. The top of the page contains iTunes-esque controls for playing, pausing and skipping songs, as well as voting them up or down. From the same toolbar, users can type in the name of any artist, composer or song to automatically generate a radio station based on their musical preferences.

]]> The site's new player was built using HTML5 and JavaScript, rather than relying heavily on Flash. If this change was made as part of a tablet-friendly strategy, that strategy must still be under development. We tried loading the new Pandora from our iPad, but were still redirected to a page prompting us to download the native iOS app. Update: As some of our loyal commenters have pointed out, the Pandora Web app still streams content using Flash, but has wrapped the player in an HTML5 skin. Thus, it won't work on non-Flash compatible tablets like the iPad.

Pandora also has new social and sharing features on the way. The service will soon be rolling out a Twitter-style feed of recent music-listening activity from friends to serve as "a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora." With this update, stations finally get their own dedicated URL, which makes it easier for users to share stations with each other.

Until today, Pandora had a 40-hour monthly listening cap in place as a way to keep artist royalty payment costs under control. That cap has been lifted, but the service still limits the number of times you can skip songs within a given station, due to licensing restrictions.

]]> Discuss

Big Radio Takes a Shot at Pandora With Clear Channel/Echo Nest Partnership

John Paul Titlow — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:15:20 -0800

Clear Channel, the largest radio station owner in the United States, has teamed up with music intelligence platform The Echo Nest to build an Internet radio service similar to Pandora and Last.fm.

Clear Channel's iHeartRadio service uses The Echo Nest's massive dataset of 30 million songs and 5 billion related data points to let users create radio stations based on their musical tastes. It has been dubbed a potential "Pandora killer" by Billboard and indeed its functionality could hardly be more similar to Pandora's. Users can create stations based on a particular artist or song, vote tracks up or down and skip a limited number of songs per station.

]]> The service packages a personalized Internet radio streaming experience alongside a large directory of Clear Channel's pre-programmed radio stations, which can be streamed for free.

With this launch, Clear Channel is clearly taking a shot at Pandora and similar Internet radio products. Even though traditional radio broadcast stations still make up the lion's share of total listenership, online streaming services have been growing fast, with the newly-public Pandora posting some promising early financial results.

In testing out iHeartRadio, we found it to be a pretty solid service overall. Some of its recommendations were a little predictable, and we found that the song-to-song matches sounded more like matches based on artist. For example, we started a station based on a slow, more ambient-sounding song by Radiohead and the songs that played were just random songs by artists commonly associated with Radiohead, including some up-tempo rock songs that sounded nothing like the original track.

Still, the potential advantage that The Echo Nest's recommendation engine offers is in the size of its dataset. With 5 billion datapoints and 30 million songs indexed, it just might pose a credible threat to Pandora's 800,000-song index. The Echo Nest uses acoustic analysis, data-mining, natural language processing and machine learning to listen to and learn about music, including the relationships between various songs and artists. It currently powers just under 200 Web-based music apps, including from some big players like MTV, the BBC and MOG. It also powers scrappy, but neat independent Web apps like Echofi, the Spotify recommendation tool we wrote about yesterday.

iHeartRadio is in open beta. To try it out you'll have to connect your Facebook account and 'Like' the product on Facebook (yes, before trying it and determining if you actually like it or not). In addition to a Web interface, the service has mobile apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 7.

Lead photo by Andrew Taylor.

]]> Discuss

As Digital Revenue Grows, Will the Web Finally Disrupt Radio?

John Paul Titlow — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 08:32:01 -0800

Internet radio service Pandora posted its first financial results as a public company yesterday, six months after filing for an IPO. While the company may not yet be profitable, it's off to a pretty good start in terms of growth. Its total revenue grew 117% year-over-year and its total listeners grew 125%.

Contained amongst these investor-pleasing stats was another takeaway: The company is now commanding ad rates comparable to those sold on terrestrial radio stations, as GigaOm pointed out.
]]> Pandora made $67 million in revenue during the second quarter, the vast majority of which was from advertising. As one analyst noted, the company is now generating more revenue per 1,000 listening hours than its traditional counterparts.

Traditional Radio Still Dominates

These facts come with one huge, obvious caveat. As Pandora CEO Joseph Kennedy stressed, the company still has only a tiny percentage of the total listenership of radio. It commands less than 4% of total U.S. radio listening and lost $1.8 million in Q2. And while terrestrial radio has had its share of challenges like most traditional media industries, at $17 billion per year it's far from the brink of death.

Still, the trends reported in Pandora's financial data suggest some serious long-term viability for Internet radio. In 2010, terrestrial radio revenue increased 6%, which was a big deal because it was the first year-over-year increase the industry had seen since 2006. By contrast, Pandora is reporting quarterly revenue growth of 117% and the company expects that growth to continue.

The Web is Better For Content, But What About Revenue?

That the number of people listening to Web-based radio services like Pandora is growing is hardly surprising. Compared to the limited, one-size-fits-all form that FM radio music stations have taken, the option to stream music based on one's actual tastes would seem to offer the ultimate alternative. Long gone are the days when program directors and media executives decide what people hear, see and read.

But that's not news. The Internet successfully disrupted the way content is distributed and consumed awhile ago, and yes, it's done an excellent job. What it has struggled with, in many cases, is finding a business model to support those new means of content distribution. Internet radio appears set to do that in a way that would make newspapers and magazines jealous.

To be sure, print media would kill for the ad rates Pandora is commanding. Many of them are rethinking the advertising-supported model for online content in favor of paywalls and subscriptions. Meanwhile, for Pandora relied on paying subscribers for only about 13% of its total revenue. Of course, there are reasons why advertising seems to be so much more effective for the likes of Pandora, starting with the differences in format. It's safe to assume that a 10-second audio ad combined with a homepage takeover on Pandora.com is going to command more money than a skyscraper banner ad on a newspaper Website.

At the end of the day, it's still early in this game. This was literally Pandora's first-ever earnings report as a public company. While the company's revenue is growing, so are its operating costs, which include pricey content acquisition arrangements and an increasing marketing budget. Still, if Web-based music services like Pandora and its competitors can continue to hammer out a viable business model, the future of radio may sound very different.
]]> Discuss

Slacker Makes Strategic Move to Try to Catch Pandora

Dan Rowinski — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:00:00 -0800

Slacker Radio is looking for ways to add revenue to their mobile streams and is teaming with mobile video advertising company YuMe to optimize monetization of its mobile division. Slacker has between 25 and 30 million subscribers, most of whom come to the service from pre-loaded devices on most of the major U.S. carriers. As such, adding a stout mobile advertising model could mark Slacker as the next major force in the competitive music streaming market.

Slacker is in growth mode. With those 30 million members come almost 400,000 paid premium subscriptions. The company is able to convert about 10% of new mobile free subscribers to paid members, a robust number. Yet, it is important for Slacker to optimize its streaming product as 75% to 85% of listening on the service comes from the free streaming product and not the paid on-demand option. That is where YuMe comes in. With Spotify on the rise and Pandora the dominant service in the sector, Slacker has to make as many moves as it can to gain an edge.
]]> Slacker is an interesting player in online music streaming sector because it competes on a variety of business fronts with the other companies in the market. Its biggest advantage is that, through its partnership with the carriers, it offers carrier billing. This definitely helps maintain that 10% premium conversion rate. It has on-demand offerings with its premium membership, which pits it against Spotify, Mog and GrooveShark.

It also does free mobile streaming, which makes it a competitor with Rhapsody, Pandora and Rdio. Music on the Web has been an ultra-competitive market since Napster (which still exists through Best Buy) broke the traditional music industry model in the early 2000s. Yet, Slacker thinks that it can take what made the traditional model so successful and apply it to the new era of music online.

Traditional Model Applied To Digital Era

Slacker's radio channels are curated by a 80 or so "experts" that the company thinks of as traditional disc jockeys. The idea is to have a mix of people's favorite music coupled with new or obscure artists for users to discover. Once a user hears something they might want to buy, the Slacker premium model is there to fulfill that purchase. In this way it is no different from the music industry of the 1950s to 1990s when people listened to the radio and then ran to the record store to buy the newest album.

Yet, free music on the radio has never really existed without ads. Even Pandora, which started sans-advertising, now has ads (or a premium model without) and it has carried the company to a moderately successful IPO. YuMe can help Slacker with this and the two companies are uniquely suited for each other. Both are mobile first and both have services optimized for iOS, Android and Blackberry (Slacker also does Windows Phone 7 and Symbian).

Slacker is only going to get bigger. It has made a deal to be the primary music streaming service for AOL, a move that the company thinks will double its subscription base. The conversion rate to premium memberships will undoubtedly be lower but the more ears Slacker can get, the innovation it can bring to the space and content licenses it can acquire. Will it be enough to separate it from the likes of Mog, Rdio and Rhapsody (and now Spotify) and approach Pandora levels? That remains to be seen.

]]> Discuss

mSpot Finds its Cloud Music Niche: Locker & Radio in One

Sarah Perez — Thu, 26 May 2011 13:17:00 -0800

In the battle of cloud music services, you have a variety of options including radio service like Pandora and Last.fm, online lockers like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, Internet radio stations and premium, "program-your-own" services like MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody and Zune. But what if you want it all? Then you may want to consider mSpot and its recently updated mobile app for Android.
]]> mSpot, a Hybrid Cloud Music Service

To be fair, with the launch of the newly revamped application, mSpot is providing only three of the four service types mentioned above. You can't play music on demand just yet.

But when asked if the company was considering such a move, mSpot's co-founder and CEO Daren Tsui said, "we're looking into that." He also mentioned that he has several ideas for additional paid-only features that mSpot will debut later this year - features which could entice its free users to move into the premium tiers, he said. Tsui wouldn't detail what these features are, however. But he did say that while the features themselves may not be novel, the way they're packaged into mSpot's hybrid system is.

And what could be better than music on demand, we ask? We expect that's one of the hooks that mSpot has in mind. If so, this mashup music service could be the one that finally sells streaming music naysayers on giving "the cloud" a shot. Whether you prefer to purchase your own tracks, serendipitously discover new music through radio plays or listen to curated streams, mSpot has it. And maybe one day, on-demand tunes too.

For now, the service is free, and you get 5 GB of storage free. For $3.99/month, you can have 40 GB instead. Other tiers will be introduced this year, with access to more features. The iOS version, as well as PC and Mac versions of this updated service will launch later this year, as well.

Mspot's Features

Mspot also offers a few bonuses that not all its competitors have: live lyrics that display while music plays, "cached mode" for offline access to tunes (even for entire playlists), automatic export of metadata, cover art and playlists from iTunes, automatic, wireless syncing from PC to cloud (i.e., when you add more music to your desktop music collection it immediately syncs to mSpot), and continuous playback of songs even in areas where cellular coverage is spotty.

In addition, with the newly updated mobile application (beta), you're given 5 GB of free online storage for storing the MP3's you own, access to hundreds of Internet radio stations, access to mSpot's own 80 to 85 programmed stations and a Pandora-like personal radio player that builds a station based on artists or genres you like.

And unlike Amazon's new Cloud Player app, when you stream your own music online via mSpot, it isn't just a means to an end - it also helps to serve up recommendations. As your listening preferences change, so do these recommendations.

Not bad for a free app.

For those unaware, mSpot is not a newcomer to mobile music, despite its low-profile name. The company has been building mobile apps for over 6 and a half years now, including the white label radio apps for AT&T, Sprint, U.S. Cellular and others. The company also has other entertainment-focused apps like mSpot Movies.

To learn more about the service or to try out mSpot for yourself, head to www.mspot.com.
]]> Discuss

Knock Knock. Who's There? Pandora! (Pandora Got Comedy, Get It?)

Mike Melanson — Tue, 03 May 2011 21:58:35 -0800

Pandora has been one of our favorite online destinations for streaming music recommendations for years now, but today, the site has gone one step further - stand up comedy.

The site, which lets you create stations according to genre or artist, has taken this same time-tested formula and applied it to the realm of stand-up comedy, bringing the likes of Rodney Dangerfield, Mitch Hedberg and George Carlin to its millions of monthly users.
]]> Pandora, which just celebrated 10 billion thumbs up and down yesterday, announced the addition of comedy stations on its blog, with founder Tim Westergren and CTO Tom Conrad writing that "adding comedians to the mix has been one of the top requests from our listeners."

With music, Pandora organizes songs and artists according to a number of different characteristics, as defined in the Music Genome Project. The company says it has taken a similar approach with comedy:

[...]so we've taken the same approach to comedy as we have to music: carefully and deliberately analyzing comedic "bits" across a very large number of attributes to capture the style, delivery and content of each performance. It's been a very fun experience, taking what we've learned in music and applying it to a whole new category. Now, instead of talking about "minor keys," "falsetto," and "extensive vamping," our comedy-analysts capture "odd juxtaposition" (A horse walks into a bar...), "misdirection" and "spoonerisms" (a well-boiled icicle, instead of a well-oiled bicycle)...

They say they've worked with a team of comedians, classifying more than 10,000 sketches from more than 700 different comics into a variety of genres. And if you're wondering, a warning plays when the station begins saying that it contains "explicit and offensive material", so it sounds like Pandora isn't about to censor the acts. That's good, because who wants a PG-13 Richard Prior or George Carlin, right? And just like with the music, you can create stations based on genres, which you can see below, or by comic.

Head on over to Pandora's new comedy channel and give it a whirl.
]]> Discuss

Pandora Hits 10 Billion Thumbs Up or Down

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:18:53 -0800

Music recommendation service Pandora marked today what it calls perhaps its proudest milestone in 6 years since launching: 10 billion user interactions indicating approval or disapproval of a particular song. Those thumbs up or down are used to determine subsequent recommendations for a particular user's Pandora channels.

The 10 billionth thumb was pointed up and was for the song "Ridin' Solo" by Jason DeRulo, an autotuned song I personally consider annoying and repetitive. That's the beauty of Pandora: I don't have to listen to anything like that song if I don't want to.
]]> Pandora faces far more competition today than it has at other times in its history, but as free, easy to use, lean-back music discovery experiences go - it's still very hard to beat. Unless you're not in the United States; in that case this whole conversation is likely a sore one.

None the less, the company and its capacity to turn user feedback into more intelligent recommendations have become a metaphor for many people. A Google search for the phrase "like Pandora for" returns almost 50,000 results, including links to things like a "Pandora for movies" (Jinni), a "Pandora for books" (many different sites) and "Pandora for bros" (fratmusic.com).

Above: A photo of Pandora's community manager Aaron Morgan, from Twitter.
]]> Discuss

Spotify Puts New Caps on Free Music (and Knows You'll Hate It)

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 01:41:33 -0800

European upstart music service Spotify just announced that it is putting new limits on its millions of free account holders. "[I]t's vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you," the company said in its announcement, "but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward."

CNet's Greg Sandoval reported yesterday that some new limits were coming, based on unnamed but clearly well-informed sources. Free account holders today are able to listen to up to 20 hours of music on-demand, song by song and album by album, each month. The new limits will allow 20 hours for the first 6 months of any user's new account. After 6 months, free listening will be cut down to 10 hours. That means 20 minutes on average, every day of the month, for free. That's still generous, as far as I'm concerned.
]]> The company will offer free 30 day trials of unlimited listening for the month of May. Here in the United States, Spotify is generally unavailable.

Spotify is a joy to use and free account holders are sure to be unhappy about the changes (maybe they should help pay the bills at the company and be happy for the service).

Spotify head of communications Jim Butcher Tweeted just hours before the announcement was made that his gumshield (like a mouth protector for boxers) was in. Spotify UI designer Tobias Ahlin said just after the news went public: "This is a day when I'll be a sad panda and you'll try to hit me with sticks." Spotify Chief Product Officer Gustav Söderström : "Very tough day today..."

Good luck guys, and thanks for all the music.

]]> Discuss

Pandora Inside Cars

Richard MacManus — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 21:49:15 -0800

For online radio service Pandora, the car was a logical place to take their web app. At a SXSW Interactive panel on connected cars, Jessica Steel of Pandora noted that radio is already a well established experience inside a car. "50% of all radio listening happens in the car," she said, so it was "a really important strategic destination" to bring Pandora into the vehicle.

This is the fourth post in our series looking at how the user experience (UX) of consuming media has changed with the increasing popularity of devices other than the PC. So far we've looked at music on smartphones, news apps on the iPad and RSS Readers on smartphones. Today we go well outside the traditional PC world, where the Web has only just begun to make inroads: the car.
]]> Pandora inside cars is an extension of its usage on smartphones. The app itself actually runs on a smartphone, although the user interaction is handled within the car dashboard - care of technology provided by car manufacturers like Ford and Chevrolet.

Image: Chevrolet MyLink

Pandora: From the Web to Smartphones to Cars

Jessica Steel, EVP of Business and Corporate Development at Pandora, explained the evolution. Pandora launched in 2005 as a Web browser service. After that, smartphones were an important extension for the company - beginning from when the iPhone was launched in 2007. On any given day now, she continued, "half of peoples' listening [on Pandora] is happening on a smartphone."

There are over 50 million people using Pandora on a smartphone, according to Steel, and "they're carrying that experience into the car." The company's challenge is to make listening to Pandora in the car "as seamless as interacting with radio in the car has always been."

To do this Pandora has invested in partnerships, such as Ford Sync, Chevrolet MyLink and others. The aim is to take the "command and control" of the app the user is carrying on their smartphone and "move it back into the head unit [of the car] - where it belongs." So from the dashboard of the car, the user can pull up the station list, select a station, thumb up a song, discover music and more. Here's a video demonstration from Ford (it starts off by demonstrating the old method, then moves to the newer dashboard integrated technology):

Although features like thumbing up or down a song aren't necessarily mandated by Pandora for their partners to include, both Ford and Chevrolet provide the main Pandora features. The only real difference is that the app is 'driven' from the dashboard, rather than the phone.

Development Environment Isn't Easy

Although we're focusing on the user experience in this series, it's worth pointing out that it takes a lot more effort to bring web apps into an environment like the car. The development platform in any given car is usually not as simple as on a smartphone like Android.

Steel explained that for just a single car line for one automotive OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer), there may be 3 or 4 suppliers that Pandora needs to work with to make the product work.

"It's a big investment" in terms of engineering resources and effort, but "there's nothing more strategic" right now to Pandora than to make that investment.

Driver & Passenger Safety

A big part of the SXSW panel on connected cars was about how to ensure the safety of users in the car. As we all know, smartphones and other Internet-connected devices can be a distraction from other activities. Nick Pudar, VP of Business Development at OnStar (a subsidiary of GM), commented that driver distraction is a key issue with car apps.

Because radio was already a mainstay in the vehicle, Pandora felt that they were not pushing new behavior. However, Jessica Steel emphasized that interactions have to be as seamless for Pandora in the car, as on a traditional car radio. To do this the company invested in a technology it called Pandora Link. Steel explained that this "allows the manufacturers of radio head units to write the software to take over control of the phone; and put the command and control of Pandora back into the head unit."

Here's Pandora integrated, in the latest touchscreen format, inside Chevrolet cars (skip to 1:20 for the demo):

It's interesting to note that Pandora itself doesn't control the user interaction of its app inside the car. In fact, the OEMs are the ones making the decisions about user interaction for Pandora in the car. This implies that the user experience is slightly different in each model of car, which is an issue that web apps in cars will need to be wary of. Inconsistent user experience has traditionally been a common form of frustration for consumers in the computing world.

Conclusion: Get Ready For Hundreds of Connected Devices!

The car is just one example of real-world objects becoming increasingly connected to the Internet, part of a trend we track closely at ReadWriteWeb called the Internet of Things. Indeed, Pandora is already on "200 plus home consumer electronics devices," according to Jessica Steel. Including a refrigerator!

Do you use Pandora inside your car? If so we'd love to know about your user experience, in the comments.
]]> Discuss

How to Track the Future of the Music Industry

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 21:26:56 -0800

There is simply nothing like Twitter for being a fly on the wall. People sit at work and tweet about what they're doing. They tweet at night, they tweet in the morning and they tweet a lot on the weekends - find a vein of good tweets from a group of people you want to learn from, watch it over time and the world is your oyster.

That's my theory, anyway. One of the things I'm interested in tracking are the streaming music services. So tonight I built a Twitter list of people who work at Rdio, Pandora, Mog and Spotify. (Then I remembered Grooveshark!) Give it a click and you can follow it too. I'll show you how I made it below - and of course this process could be applied to any field.
]]> Step 1 - I knew where the list of Rdio staff members was, because I had asked my darling virtual assistants at FancyHands by email to find it for me a few weeks ago. So tonight I sent that link to them as an example and asked them to find similar lists of staff members curated by other companies in the space. I asked for Pandora, Spotify and Mog. I remembered Grooveshark later.

Becky from Fancyhands sent me back great links for lists to Pandora and Spotify right away. The list she sent from Mog wasn't so great but no one appeared to have made a list of Mog employees yet.

Step 2 - I made a list of Mog employees by searching for them on LinkedIn. Then I trained the point-and-click database creation tool Needlebase to go to that search result page URL, click through each person's profile link, check and see if they had a Twitter profile linked there and if so scrape it for me. (My tutorial.) I created a new list of Mog employees myself and added each of those people to it.

Step 3 - I only had a small handful of Mog employees so far and I knew there were more on Twitter, so I searched for mentions of Mog in Twitter bios using Twellow. At that point I had 8 Moggers and was ready to move on with my life. Then I remembered Grooveshark and saw that they had a nice staff list they had created themselves.

Step 4 - I was complaining on Twitter today about how hard it is to splice multiple Twitter lists together and my new pal David McKinney said "try Formulists!"

I did and it was AWESOME. Click click boom, thank you Formulists, here now is a list of exactly 140 people (coincidence!) on staff at the 5 leading streaming music services:

Streaming Music Industry People

Give that link a click, follow the list, then either visit the link on your Twitter page or add it as a column in Tweetdeck or Seesmic and just like that, you'll have a front row seat for conversations between some of the hippest cats online. Hey, Team Rdio, thanks for the music - I'm so happy I subscribed!

]]> Discuss

TweetLouder is a Fast Easy Way to Track Your Favorite Bands

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:51:08 -0800

Tweetlouder is a new service that uses your Twitter account and your music listening history to connect you with Twitter and concert updates from all your favorite musicians in just a few clicks. It's a project of concert tracking startup SonicLiving. It was first demonstrated as a proof of concept at Twitter's developer conference, Chirp.

I've been syncing my music listening history from Rdio and Spotify to Last.fm lately, so it was really easy to click click click and boom - there's the official Twitter accounts of all the bands I've been playing on those services. You can also sync with iTunes or Pandora. After I followed the bands it discovered on Twitter, I put them in a Twitter List, which I can now visit whenever I want to see some music updates. Cool. Thanks, Tweetlouder.
]]> Concert alerts is an incredibly crowded market, but this is a cool feature that's sure to help draw attention to SonicLiving. It's a great example of a way that 3rd parties can add value on top of our accessible data.

]]> Discuss