I was rummaging around the early recording industry trade journal Talking Machine World the other day, and ran into an item that reminded me of a recent Pandora innovation: its mobile alarm clock feature. The Internet Archive has copies of TMW from the Progressive Era through the 1920s. I quote from a January 1906 edition […]
Tag Archives | Pandora
What Apple Should Do To Make Beats Music Successful
Late last week the news broke that Apple is buying Beats Audio for $3.2 billion. As most observers have noted, this is an unusually large acquisition for Apple, which tends not to buy companies that already have such prominent brands, for so much money. With the Beats acquisition Apple gets a successful audio company selling […]
Blowing in the wind? Pandora to launch Kleenex music channel
Pandora is now experimenting with channels sponsored by Kleenex, Taco Bell, and Sketchers. These are called Promoted Stations. Here’s the dope straight from the source: “Listeners that are part of the beta launch will have these stations auto-populate, one station at a time, in the ‘Stations You Might Like’ sections of their playlists. This allows […]
If Pandora goes the way of Amazon, what’s next?
The fascinating world of online stuff and online music sharing continues to navigate its strange post-modern course as worried projections about Amazon.com and Pandora Media waft across the news/blogosphere. What do Pandora and Amazon have in common? They function in an environment in which revenue and profits appear to depend on technology, but in fact depend […]
Amazon’s New Fire TV Looks Like a Nice Internet Radio
Today Amazon announced its own set-top streaming box, the Fire TV, to compete with the likes of Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast. It’s more like the two former devices and less like Chromecast because it’s not completely device-dependent and can be operated with its own remote using an on-screen menu. However, it does offer mirroring […]
With Last.fm radio gone, it’s back to Pandora/Spotify VPN tricks for Canada
On April 28, Last.fm will shut down its subscription radio stream. That means the company won’t be streaming content through its own servers, just third party stuff, mostly from YouTube and Spotify. “We understand that many of you will not like this decision,” a Last.fm forum post announced on Wednesday. A flood of Last.fm users agreed. […]
Spotify premium student discount: loss leader challenge to the young?
“The Student Discount is here,” Spotify announced today. “Spotify Premium is now 50% off for students.” This is for college students, I presume (I sneaked a peek at the discount form; it definitely asks users for their “college”). So qualified college attendees get ad free Spotify for $4.99 instead of $9.99. The discount comes as Pandora […]
Beyond the wild west: government and the future of music radio
Turntable.fm shut down its last component earlier this year: Turntable Live—a concert version of now gone turntable.fm. TT.fm founder Billy Chasen reflected on the end of the Turntable project in a blog entry posted on Wednesday: “Ultimately, I didn’t heed the lessons of so many failed music startups. It’s an incredibly expensive venture to pursue […]
Copyright Office asks cold hard cash questions in music inquiry
The Copyright Office’s Library of Congress has launched a new Notice of Inquiry on the “effectiveness of existing methods of licensing music,” an issue dear to the heart of pretty much everybody invested in any kind of music distribution system, from AM/FM radio to Sirius XM to iTunes. “The Office will use the information it […]
Copyright, stocks, and the Pandora mystique
Pandora fans (and presumably Pandora) breathed a sigh of relief on Friday when a federal judge left the music streamer’s copyright tithe percentage unchanged. From back in 2011 through next year (2015) Pandora must fork over 1.85 percent of its revenue to ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), which represent copyright holders. […]