Archive for: pandora
Spotify has just launched their upgraded Spotify Radio service that takes a direct shot at Pandora. Spotify Radio offers unlimited stations and unlimited skips, so it is a mile ahead of the competition (potentially makes Pandora and We7 pointless).
Features:
A unique radio experience
Thanks to our all-new intelligent recommendation engine and multi-million track library, Spotify Radio is a music discovery experience without equal.
Unlimited skips
Don’t like a track? Skip it. You can skip as many times as you like. It’s your radio station.
The new Spotify Radio is being rolled out as we speak but you can also get the preview now! The preview version available for you here.
Pandora is a music service based in the USA which introduces listeners to music they’ve never heard before is one of our central missions, and we welcome independent artists from all backgrounds and levels of visibility, working in all styles, to submit their music for possible inclusion in Pandora’s Music Genome Project.
Every song selected is manually analyzed by a trained musician along up to 400 distinct musical attributes, a process that can take anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours per song. Pandora submissions are open to artists from all over the world, but at the moment they only operate in the USA, and royalties from streaming music is only paid to USA artists.
The Basics: How to Submit
To submit music to Pandora, you’ll need these items:
1) a CD of your music
2) a unique UPC code for that CD*
3) this CD to be available through Amazon as a physical CD (and not just as MP3s)**
4) the legal rights to your music
5) a standard free Pandora account, based on a valid email address, that will be associated with this submission
6) MP3 files for two of the songs from your CD
Once you have all of these items ready to go, you can submit your music to Pandora for consideration here: http://submitmusic.pandora.com/.
At a recent NYC Pandora listener meetup CEO Tim Westergren offered these Pandora stats:
- It costs Pandora 2¢/hr to stream
- Pandora adds about 85,000 new listeners per day
- Pandora makes up 1 1/4 of all radio
- Out of 100 hours, 1 hour and 15 minutes of radio is listened to on Pandora
- Pandora has 3/4 of a million songs so far; 90 million of those three-fourths were played last month
- Dancing Queen” by ABBA was Pandora’s first song analyzed through the Music Genome Project
- It takes about 15 minutes for a trained musician to analyze a pop song and about one hour and a half for a symphony
- 1 out of every 4 or 5 songs gets a thumb (whether up or down)
- Pandora receives about 3,000 emails per month
- Pandora music analysts are paid about $40/hr; they are covered by health insurance; they work flexible hours (Tim definitely encourages this job)
- Pandora has advertised for 45 out of the 50 top advertisers
- During Pandora’s first year, the 90210 zip code was the area listening to Pandora the most
- Pandora admits to 0.4% of missed searches. That is, Pandora will get stumped 0.4% of the time when you enter a song or artist
- Pandora pays a publishing fee to composers and a performance fee
- Pandora abides by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which shapes radios and mandates royalties
- Less than 100,000 songs in the entire history of radio broadcast have ever been played
- On average an individual listens to 17 hours of radio per week
- Of the 17 hours of radio listened, 96% are listened to through broadcast radio (so NOT Pandora because it is a unicast radio)
Pandora founder Tim Westergren said in an interview at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, that Pandora had not only more than doubed its revenue in 2009, but turned in a black balance sheet for the first time in its 10-year history during the fourth quarter.
Pandora has signed deals with both Pioneer and Ford Motor Co., to ensure their service will be placed into thousands of car dashboards over the coming year, “Maybe a year ago people would have said Pandora is a computer thing,” said Westergren. “Now they’re beginning to realize that Internet radio is an anytime, anywhere thing.” This news is bound to be good for Pandora’s bottom line, but mobile internet will be another thorn in the side of satellite radio providers like Sirius, who are already under fire from the NASDAQ to get their stock price above $1.
It has been reported yesterday that Pandora has secured a new round of funding. If you are not aware what Pandora is, its a personalised online radio service. Pandora lets users choose which artists they like and then suggests new artists to them with the hope that they will also like their music. Pandora currently is based in the USA and is only for USA users, which is why most people here in the UK and outside the USA havent heard that much about Pandora.
However, within the next few months we hope to offer a new option to only a select few of RouteNote users, which is going to allow them to get their music onto the Pandora service and help promote their music in the USA. The downside is that only USA artists who are signed up to ASCAP and BMI can receive royalties for their streams. However, here at RouteNote we still believe this is a great opportunity for our artists to gain a lot more exposure in the USA, plus Pandora provide one of the leading iPhone applications which links in very nicely with iTunes, so if users enjoy your music they can purchase straight away. In the future we hope to have a more all round deal with Pandora but this is going to be very difficult until they launch in other markets outside of the USA.
Pandora is a music startup that he been getting a lot of great reviews of late. Pandora will reach profitability in 2010 according to founder Tim Westergren. Revenue is expected to double this year to $40 million thanks to targeted ads delivered to 27 million registered users which are growing at the rate of 50,000 to 60,000.
With the iPhone app release for Pandora they have been seeing a third of their growth come in this area. “It’s changed the perception people have of what Internet radio is, from computer-radio to radio, because you can take the iPhone and just plug it into your car, or take it to the gym.”
The yesterday Pandora also announced their new Pandora One service, which is just Pandora a few added features and of course no ads. Pandora One is a subscription based service in which is only $36 a year. Additionally with Pandora One they have released a desktop application which includes high quality streaming, a personalized look, a mini player and extended player timeouts
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In what may prove a revolutionary move, YouTube is refusing to pay the increased licensing fee that the MCPS/PRS alliance has demanded for the right to stream music videos for signed artists in the UK.
Music licensing can be a knotty problem; while most of the copyrights necessary to permit streaming for tracks belong to the record labels that have direct agreements with YouTube, there are other authorship rights that artists and songwriters can retain, or assign to be protected by the MCPS/PRS, which will attempt to collect revenues on their behalf whenever a song is played.
The previous licence that YouTube had negotiated with the PRS has expired, and the asking price for a new one is larger by many multiples. On top of this, the PRS has declined to specify what rights and what songs are actually covered by the agreement they’re offering to sell YT. In effect the PRS is demanding to be paid for a mystery box, which may or may not contain anything that YouTube actually needs.
The PRS have a different take on this, of course. They claim to be outraged on behalf of both artists and consumers that Google/YouTube have taken the drastic step of shutting down official access to music videos in the UK. Personally I find this quite unbelievable, since all they would need to do to permit the consumers to see these videos is set out exactly what rights they’re selling, and agree a reasonable price, rather than pulling a number out of the air, for an undisclosed package of rights and expecting it to be paid without question.
As we ponder all this, let’s think back to Jan 2008, when the MCPS/PRS forced Pandora, an online radio site that is nothing to do with Microsoft, to shut down UK operation. Pandora said they couldn’t operate sustainably if they had to pay the fees demanded of them. Do these sound like instances of the PRS looking after the rights of consumers and the artists they represent, or is it more like the stifling of new technologies and ways of consuming music, and why can’t the PRS specify what they’re actually bringing to the table in a deal this important?
What is sure is that while the content that’s being wrangled over is unavailable through more legitimate channels, the consumers will be looking elsewhere for their entertainment, to sites like the Pirate Bay to direct them to torrents that generate zero revenue for the artists concerned.
A lot of people are losing revenue and losing their jobs as the whole geography of the music industry, and the entertainment industry at large is gripped in the seismic change the internet is facilitating, and you can’t blame groups like the PRS and the big labels for trying to retain control. This said, perhaps stifling new channels like YouTube and Pandora is cutting off their nose to spite their face, and they would be better off supporting innovation, and creating new ways to generate revenue and help people enjoy the great music that their artists are creating.
