Past EED rants

Labels

Live leaderboard

Poker leaderboard

Voice of EED

Monday 21 January 2008

Omg they killed Pandora [Am]


pandoraFor quite a while a number of us had been using the excellent streaming radio of Pandora to fill our ears with entertaining toons. Now Pandora worked on a feed from the Music Genome project which, a bit like amazon's 'also bought' type functionality led a listener away from an inputted band and into lots of bands that were profiled of a similar ilk. Many interesting discoveries of stuff you never heard before could be made in this vein with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down system for the user to train up the prog even more. Forward-winds were limited an hour to avoid licensing problems.

That is, as they you used to say on Science World, until now....

The licensing of Pandora was US centric due to the complexities of music licensing globally and the fact that a US startup was clearly going to focus on its home market. However it was possible to listen to it elsewhere as long as one had the opinion, creative or otherwise, that one was in the US in some manner computorily or another. However it is quite clear that the kaibosh has been firmly put on this and now linked off their login. http://www.pandora.com/restricted

Well that's a bit of a pity innit. Is there anything else people would recommend?

6 comments:


  1. This is interesting. last.fm launched a significant overhaul of their listening model today. In case you don't know, last.fm do a similar thing to Pandora, only more social network oriented - think Pandora crossed with Facebook. You still get the same recommendation radio, but you also get neighbour radio stations, groups, forums and artist pages. But still the same basic random music choice that you can steer with only limited success.

    Today's annoucement sees them offering full album listening from the four major record labels. It seems that you just find an album page and hit play. You are limited to three listens of a track or album, but they intend to offer a subscription service where this restriction is removed, taking the service closer to Napster's subscription model presumably.

    It sounds ace in theory - three free listens to an album before you buy it sounds like a good deal to me. However, on my 15 minute investigation I found very few full albums on there (in fact, one) but when they're there, they do indeed play. I don't know if the scarcity is an early days thing, or whether the selection will be this limited. If they do manage to bolster the offering though, this will be massive.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well that's the problem isn't it. Someone comes up with a good model for music sales but of course there's only one publisher with the vision to support it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well as it happens they've killed global pandora too with an error message from the embedded pandora app saying 'technical issue' but the story that was covered in Crunch says that it has been deaded

    ReplyDelete

  4. I've got a server in the US, anyone wanna buy a secure proxy? :)

    ReplyDelete

  5. Shurely shome mistake? Shurely 'pleased to announce this as a value added service for all my loyal multi-year hosting clients who pay my *cough cough cough* minimalistic charging rates'?


    ReplyDelete