Pandora Introduces Genre Based Station Feature
In an effort to improve their service Pandora is now allowing genre based station seeding and has launched over 100 genre based stations to their line-up. Station seeding in the past was accomplished through the user providing an artist or song name from which Pandora would begin to customize a channel. The new feature allows for a more general seeding from which users can build a station.
Features such as this should improve the user interface, especially for new users. There is no pressure to think of a song title, or feel pigeon-holed by selecting a particular band. The more general genre based system should give a wide cross section of content that will allow for better music discovery as Pandora caters the station to the users likes and dislikes.
Services such as Pandora have been working on ways to improve their service and increase revenue. If they can make the user experience positive on the free service, they are more likely to convince the user to become a paying subscriber.
Position - Long Sirius XM Radio
I just checked-in with MUSCLE13 to get his opinion and, although he is a very busy mensch, here is what he had to say in response to this article:
“I personally believe Pandora is a fad much like Broadcast.com was in the 1990s. Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5 Billion. Where is it now? It was early to the internet radio game and got inundated by hundreds of thousands of alternative internet radio options. Pandora was early to the smartphone apps and will similarly get inundated by the hundreds of thousands of internet radio apps that are about to go on smartphones.
It’s simply a bad business.”
sweeeeeeet! I hated trying to build a “old 50’s rock and roll” station by having to think up “Blue Suede Shoes”, Chuck Berry, etc… Now I can just choose a “50’s Rock and Roll” Genre station and let the Music Discovery begin!!!! I’m absolutely giddy with excitement.
Damnit SiriusXM, you guys are getting your clocks cleaned. What you need to do to match Pandora, is come up with a genre station like that. Oh wait… you already do… like almost all your music stations.
lol… give me a break
Tell me again? How do I get Tom Petty’s Buried Treasure Show on Pandora? or any of the other specially hosted music shows that make SiriusXM’s superior overall content at 12.95 a month a stupidly cheap bargain? Pandora doesn’t have that you say?
’nuff said.
What’s the matter Spence? Not getting enough attention?
You people are so damn afraid of any other service that you simply belittle anything that is not Sirius XM. Smart people want to know what their competitors are doing.
nuff said
I wonder how the genre based song lists sound while they are buffering. “buffering…please wait…” – lol
What cell plans do you people have….You really should look into a better one. Slacker, Pandora and Sirius XM Internet Radio RARELY buffer where I am. I use Verizon.
Once they start to think about paying, they’ll go where the superior content is, Sirius-XM.
btw . .
“Pandora One” has only 300,000 subscribers, which accounts for just 1.6 or 1.7 percent of monthly uniques.
per Tom Conrad himself:
“As for our business model, we make money from advertising, subscriptions, and commerce. The big opportunity for us is advertising; it would be pretty much impossible for us to recover our bandwidth and licensing costs from commerce alone. Our costs are largely dominated by licensing and bandwidth. We are licensed through soundexchange, bmi, ascap, and sesac. Their rates are publicly documented.”
visit the forums to see Pandora’s proforma Profit & Loss Statement for 2010 . .
Although I tried, I was unable to post the link here . .
per Michael Robertson, a 12-year veteran of the digital music business. He is the founder and former CEO of digital music pioneer MP3.com. He is currently the CEO of music locker company MP3tunes. Until recently he was an adviser to Google Voice following the acquisition of Gizmo5.
“The per user royalty rates Pandora has agreed to pay will go up 10% per year for the next 4 years. This is the per song rate or what they must pay every time a song is played for an individual user. A highly illogical aspect of radio is that there exists a ‘spectrum bias’. Depending on the spectrum of the radio wave transmitting the song to the listener, the royalty payment can vary widely from zero to a huge number. If the song is transmitted over 30–300 MHz (FM radio) then the royalty rate is zero. For songs transmitted over 2,332.50-2,345.00 MHz (satellite radio like XM) operators are required to pay 15% of total revenues, but for those operating in internet frequencies 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz (wifi) or cellular phone the royalty structure can be 50-60% of total revenues as evident from Pandora’s analysis.”
Not the case at all. There was a new deal negotiated.
It is a fee per song OR 25% of revenue….whichever is higher. Royalties based on revenue would be 25% not 60%
I think someone knows something
NEW YORK — According to an SEC filing,
Scott Andrew Greenstein, president and chief content officer of Sirius XM Radio, Inc. (NasdaqGS: SIRI), exercised options on 6,942,034 shares, for $7,118,893.