Pandora Internet Radio to go Silent?

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Pandora Internet Radio to go Silent?

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uploaded by Erik Larson

If you haven't used Pandora.com yet, this might be your last chance. Pandora, aka the Music Genome Project, helps you find music you like, no download needed; just go to the site and type in the name of a song or artist, and Pandora begins playing music with similar qualities. From the Pandora "About the music genome project" page; "We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like." This service is free, and works amazingly well; since I've been using it, I've discovered dozens of great artists that I didn't know existed.

Unlike radio stations which play one song at a time and have commercial breaks every few songs, Pandora has easily ignored ads, plus gets a commission when you buy a song thru their site from iTunes or Amazon, etc. However, as they play hundreds of thousands of songs simultaneously for a million users a day and growing, the royalty fees are higher. Plus, last year the Copyright Royalty Board (US federal agency, contact info here) authorized a more than double increase of the royalty fees webcasters pay for playing songs. I support artist's right to get paid for the use of their work, but unless a deal is worked out this great service is gonna bite the dust- unless they get more creative with ad revenue or start charging subscribers, etc. Currently, webcasters are trying to negotiate lower fees- as Pandora and other webcasters are a great way for people to discover and fall in love with new music, and then buy it, there's an incentive for the labels and artists to have these services available.

The below article on i4u.com gives a very bried overview, and links to articles in the Washington Post and TechCrunch for more info.