January 2, 2006 Comments

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Sometimes Pandora Sucks

There you have it, I said it. As of today I am a huge fan of Pandora. In general, the service simply rocks. Just fitting music. I believe their licensing works in a way that is similar to radio, in that they pay cheaper licensing fees because I can’t really choose what to listen to. I can’t choose the next song. This is reinforced by the fact that if you skip too many songs, you will get a message that due to licensing issues they can’t allow you to skip too many songs. Now … emmm… the current song is _not_ something I want to be hearing. The guy that wrote it is probably getting money for me listening! AND I CAN’T SKIP ANYMORE! Ok, I need to learn to only skip in extrem cases.

Still, a great service and … the next one is turning out to be all right.

Update: I seem to be roughly correct in my licensing guess. Tom from Pandora commented.

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Viewing 5 Comments

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    Hi Oliver,

    Yeah, you've pretty much got it nailed: the licenses that make it possible for us to offer Pandora as a free ad-supported service (or a low-cost subscription service) are what's at work here. The basic idea behind the licenses is that listeners can't get a particular track "on demand". An unlimited number of skips would make track-on-demand pretty simple (just enter the name of a similar song and skip indefinitely until you find the one you're looking for). According to the way the copyright holders see it, if you want track-on-demand you either need to buy the track or sign up for a subscription service that costs no less than $120 a year.

    So, to keep Pandora affordable and available to the widest possible audience, we've adopted these "radio-like" licensing rules. Understand that it's frustrating, but without these limits there would be no way for us to deliver Pandora in it's current form.

    Anyway, thanks for listening and for taking time to let us know what's frustrating to you. It's more valuable than you can know.

    Best,

    Tom
    CTO @ Pandora
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    Thanks a lot for the feedback Tom! Still loving the service, so don't worry, I will remain loyal. :)
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    I do have to say i have seen tom post responses to many different peoples blogs. Truly showing that not only do they want to help the people listening but want to squash any random crap that people decide to post. So tom thanks for actually caring enough about your service and people thoughts on it.
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    The skip ahead limit, ok, I get it 'imposed by licensing', so no smack down on Pandora, but this is lame as hell. As the Tom explains, given the copyright holders position, I have to ask, WTF? If I don't like the song, I can't skip it? I don't care that I already did six skips in one hour, bite me! I'm the listener and what I want should be the only thing that matters, I'm the one with the money to spend!. How undemocratic and uncapitalistic can you get? If the music stinks, then I'm on to the next track.
    I recently discovered Pandora, being 41 and not an avid purchaser of music in my youth, I went about rediscovering music of the last 30 years….bookmarking songs I'd like for purchase, and skipping the crap along the way. Then BAM, I hit the "limit" I figured that this limit could be overcome by subscribing, reasonable I thought, but apparently not.
    I like the way Pandora match up tracks to my musical preferences, allows me to bookmark and then the convenient links to Amazon and iTunes. So I guess its par for the course for the recording industry, FAIL!

    Get with the new media or perish…..tick...tock…….
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    you can always click the refresh button and it restarts with a new song
 

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