Pandora Trying Out Invasive Commercial Breaks 244
Nathan Halverson writes "The popular online radio service Pandora.com has added brief commercial interruptions to its service. Pandora says this is a trial and is targeted to a subset of listeners at this point. In one case, a brief ad for the Fox TV show 'Lie To Me' interrupted the music stream for about 15 seconds after ten songs had initially played, and the same commercial interrupted 22 songs later. 'But [Pandora's] founder promised the site will never carry as many audio ads as broadcast radio, despite the fact it pays substantially higher royalty fees to the recording industry.'"
We need a spam filter for radio (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be willing to pay money for any program that filters out adds (without making too many mistakes).
I've always wondered why this doesn't exist for TV.
And I wondered what you should play during the adds... a random mp3 from your computer perhaps?
Alternatively, you can also switch to another station :D
Whatever, it's a great service (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hmm... of course the station needs to get money from somewhere. I always thought that record companies pay stations to play their songs. Radio is the best add for a song (and music is a product that is advertised on radio). Why advertise anything else when radio is almost 100% advertisement? :D
I immediately admit that I am not aware of the business model of radio in 2009 (both internet or the good ol' fashioned one with photons hitting your antenna).
In the ideal case, the record company should be omitted. B
Re:Whatever, it's a great service (Score:5, Informative)
Bands who want to be known give their songs to a station which broadcasts it. Band becomes famous, and people pay for the concert. But then again, I also believe in Utopia :D
That model does actually exist out there on the net -- the billboard at http://www.themusicwellhome.co.uk/ [themusicwellhome.co.uk] for instance.
Re:Whatever, it's a great service (Score:5, Informative)
> Hmm... of course the station needs to get money from somewhere. I always thought that record companies pay stations to play their songs. Radio is the best add for a song (and music is a product that is advertised on radio). Why advertise anything else when radio is almost 100% advertisement? :D
Um, it's kinda crazy, but this is known as "payola". It's not illegal for the labels to pay stations to play their songs, BUT the station has to disclose that they were paid to play the song.
Evidently, kids (who are the primary consumers of music) tend to tune out things they know are ads. So, the record labels have gone to extraordinary lengths (and have been caught MULTIPLE times) to pay radio stations to play their music WITHOUT saying they were paid to play it (easiest way to know a radio station was paid to play a song, the DJ will say it's the most requested song).
The labels are trying really hard to get radio stations to pay royalties, so they can get some of their payola money back...
Re:Whatever, it's a great service (Score:5, Insightful)
>Evidently, kids (who are the primary consumers of music) tend to tune out things they know are ads.
Actually, I think pretty much all of us that have grown up with pervasive advertising have an internal trip switch these days. It's a sad fact, but the way to keep sane in the modern (urban) environment is to selectively ignore most of the world around you.
Advertisers look for ever more invasive ways to get our attention, and then wonder why advertising has less and less effect. it's because we hate you and have learned to ignore you to the extent we don't even realise you're there half the time.
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Advertisers look for ever more invasive ways to get our attention, and then wonder why advertising has less and less effect. it's because we hate you and have learned to ignore you to the extent we don't even realise you're there half the time.
You o
Re:Whatever, it's a great service (Score:4, Interesting)
You only believe that because they told you to. Advertisers fill your head with answers to questions you never asked then when you are called on to make a decision and you're too lazy to do research or too tired to really think about what you want, you use the answers they gave you as your own.
I don't believe that for a second. I'm the kinda guy that reads ingredients lists on everything from kitchen cleaners to pharmaceuticals. I am not under the control of advertisers or marketing fuckheads, thanks. If you are then I pity you.
Re:Whatever, it's a great service (Score:5, Interesting)
If you believe that, more power to you. But everyone gets tired, everyone has moments of vulnerability where they don't want to exercise diligence. If you haven't been exposed to advertising, you get a dull look on your face because you don't have an answer and you need one and you don't want to exercise the effort, but eventually you do because you have no other option. If you have been exposed to advertising, you take the easy out because it's there. It's just part of being human.
You think you're some highly intelligent person who isn't vulnerable to these effects, and that the advertisers are preying on the sheep, who are all much stupider and less sophisticated than you are. But you're mistaken. The people the advertisers are preying on are just like you, and you're just like them.
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"If you haven't been exposed to advertising, you get a dull look on your face because you don't have an answer and you need one and you don't want to exercise the effort,"
Answers to what?
What exactly are we talking about here? the meaning of life? Which catfood to buy? (hint, the one the cat likes wins)
What?
Because to me advertising is pretty much just noise.
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We're talking about the cat food you grab off the shelf when you have no cat food at home, the one your cat likes is sold out, you don't k
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"If that's not evidence that advertising targetting the subconscious works, I don't know what is."
Or that advertising doesn't work, or that people are starting to get immune to it.
Evidence that advertising targetiing the subconscious works would require showing that it actually has an effect on top of not being noticed.
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I also think that this is nothing like the initial point of my comment - that it is getting harder and harder for any advertiser to get their message across in the sea of advertising noise, and the sea of noise makes it easier to ignore.
Because there is SO damned much of it and most of it does not get through, in order to be heard you have to be both annoying and pervasive, which is not cheap and doesn't always produce a good result.
What's your argument? That regardless of exposure we're all like a blank pa
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It is not possible that you haven't been influenced to some extent.
As the GP pointed out, advertising is more about brand awareness than anything else. You may think you're immune, and maybe on a conscious level you are, but somewhere they are most certainly making a difference.
Anecdote: I thought I was capable of ignoring advertising, too. I don't watch TV, I use adblock, and I don't read magazines. A few years ago, I used exclusively ATI cards. Nvidia wasn't even considered an option. I went to pick
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I'm not immune to brand awareness, you can't be these days, I just don't think they have any real impact.
I try not to be a fanboy of anything. I've had nVidia and ATI cards, both worked pretty well. I also like the intel card in my workstation because it's friendly to Linux, which I like because I don't have to pay for it and it does stuff I like...
I'm not totally free of ad influence, I'm sure, but I am oblivious to most of it.
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Which doesn't work if you purposefully ignore advertising, and purposefully avoid buying products with advertising you're unable to ignore. I won't say I'm immune, but practically immune. I buy what's cheap, not what I've seen advertised. If you want to manipulate me, you're going to have to do it with sales.
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Yeah I now actually have to look to find ads on pages now days. Any ad that does catch my attention generally only does so by being super annoying with the flashing colors and vibrating messageboxes or the goddamn Intellitxt ones. (I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.) When that happens I immediately adblock the entire domain that provided that ad. I don't do that very often though.
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Actually, I think pretty much all of us that have grown up with pervasive advertising have an internal trip switch these days. It's a sad fact, but the way to keep sane in the modern (urban) environment is to selectively ignore most of the world around you.
Advertisers look for ever more invasive ways to get our attention, and then wonder why advertising has less and less effect. it's because we hate you and have learned to ignore you to the extent we don't even realise you're there half the time.
Reminds me
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Check your medication. Seriously.
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"Hmm... of course the station needs to get money from somewhere. I always thought that record companies pay stations to play their songs."
I'm loving the fact that your post is 5, Informative.
By now it's been pointed out that it works the other way. Radio stations pay the rightsholders. In terrestrial radio, the songwriters and performers get most of the money (this is a good thing). The record companies, feeling left out, got the rules changed for Internet radio so that they get a sizeable piece of the pi
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Re:Whatever, it's a great service (Score:4, Funny)
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OK, I have to get this off my chest.
1) It's AD, not ADD. FFS.
2) RADIOS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY! That is to say, they don't use photons for any portion of their operation.
This message brought to you by your local science and english teachers.
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Thanks for the correction. It's a silly mistake.
Regarding point 2, the electromagnetic spectrum goes from Gamma rays, through X-rays, UV, visible light, IR, to radio waves. Those are all photons. And they're also all waves.
It's just that we like to think of radio as waves, and X-ray and gamma as particles. In the end, all of them are both: both wave and particle.
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That would be one of those special radios that you need to physically plug in to the sound source?
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The system you describe makes far too much sense, which is precisely why the record companies want no part of it. They do everything they can to suck money up, and everything they can to avoid paying money out. Whether your definition of "everything" includes legal abuse, tax fraud, racketeering, murder and extortion, well that's up to you.
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Hear hear!
I, for one, am throughly sick of the notion that all content on the Internet must be free as a matter of principle.
Things cost money, get over it. I'd rather give Pandora a few seconds of my listening time for ads than pay them a subscription. Although I'd seriously lean towards subscribing if they ever provide the option again.
Re:Whatever, it's a great service (Score:4, Informative)
I'd rather give Pandora a few seconds of my listening time for ads than pay them a subscription.
And I'd rather give Pandora a few dollars of my paycheck than listen to their ads.
Maybe this "entitlement generation" people keep talking about is just weary of being pestered by constant advertising shitting on every second of their lives. I feel like I'm walking downtown and every block there's a hobo with his hand out who won't take no for an answer. When I'm listening to music- actually listening, not just hearing it for background, it's because I'm trying to turn my mind off and enjoy a precious few minutes of free time. Between responsibilities at work and at home, being on call, being dad to a two year old, these minutes I have, say when I'm driving alone or wasting time in the garage with music playing, or just staying up for half an hour after everyone goes to bed... These moments are near sacred to me, and to be interrupted by a stupid commercial for shit I don't care about is infuriating.
Pandora was the answer for me, but if they start advertising I'm going back to "stealing" mp3s.
Re:We need a spam filter for radio (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be willing to pay money for any program that filters out adds (without making too many mistakes). I've always wondered why this doesn't exist for TV.
Isn't that what TiVo is for?
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I just mute the TV sound when the adverts come on, you'd be amazed at the difference it makes.
(Obviously this doesn't work too well with radio...)
Re:We need a spam filter for radio (Score:5, Interesting)
What I don't understand is why TVs don't yet have a function that not only mutes it, but also makes the screen almost dark. So that you can just spot when your program is back on.
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My grandfather used to turn off the tv when the commercials came on, and we would sit there in awkward silence until he turned it back on. He became surprisingly good at turning it back on at the right time. We convinced him into something with a mute button in the early 90's
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There was a bunch of TVs in the early to mid 90s that sold with a feature called "Smart Sound". My grandmother (rest her soul) got one. The difference was amazing - what it did was normalize the sound so that it was all level.
What this mostly neutered was all the TV ads that crank the volume up. With the smart sound enabled TV, you could barely hear them, because the TV quieted them down to match the show, and so the poor mixing to make the commercial sound loud made it so it didn't "stand out" so much.
Unfo
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I just mute the TV sound when the adverts come on, you'd be amazed at the difference it makes.
(Obviously this doesn't work too well with radio...)
With radio, what you want to do is mute the video during ads.
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Tivo doesn't do any filtering though. They need to teach it to do two things.
1) Add a skip forward backward feature that looks for abrupt changes in the image. If 100% of the broadcast image changes from one frame to the next, that's obviously either a gap between commercials or scenes. Now, they hang all sorts of logos and letter boxes around the signal, so it would need to have a variable threshold and probably look at a few different factors(actual pixels, aggregated measurements colour and brightness
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Yup, and for which you pay a hefty fee every year for, otherwise the detector vans come round and scan your ass (do they still have those, haven't been in Blighty for nigh on 8 years ?).
It's a similar situation with the cable TV here. While they don't run "traditional" commercials as such, they still manage to interrupt the show every 15 minutes with pointless trailers for other shows which will be airing during the week.
SO I don't think you EVER get a full 60 minutes of programming in each hour ... which i
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From what I've heard the detector vans were an urban myth. They do now us a database to work out who hasn't bought a license, and then knock on the door now and again to check up on you.
Quite honestly though, I don't mind the license fee. If it wasn't there I'd be paying for cable anyway, so it's not like I'm losing any money, and it's far better value for money.
Also, they don't "interrupt" anything for trailers for other shows. The trailers go in a 2-3 minute slot between shows. And if you're using iPlayer
Re:We need a spam filter for radio (Score:4, Informative)
From what I've heard the detector vans were an urban myth. They do now us a database to work out who hasn't bought a license, and then knock on the door now and again to check up on you.
I don't have a TV, so I know how TV licensing behave. Enforcement is mostly based on fear. If you aren't on the licence database they will write to you every three-ish months with one of a rotating set of letters. These say things like 'WARNING AGAINST UNLAWFUL ACTION', or look like fake bills, or tell you you've been added to their enforcement list and that 'Enforcement Officers' will visit in compliance with PACE (and, presumably, the Geneva conventions and the nuclear test ban treaty....). They give you a phone number they want you to ring to get yourself on a database of people declaring they have no TV. Then they write to you and say they're going to visit you anyway (and then don't) and start the letters again six months later. Meanwhile they're running (billboard) adverts saying things like 'last year we caught 157,000 licence dodgers' and 'seven people in Ebscombe Close don't have a licence'.
In eight years I've met exactly one Enforcement Officer (they're private sector contractors with no special powers). Conversation with them go like this: Him: Do you have a television. You: No. Him: Can I come in? You: No. Him: That's all I need to know [goes away].
It appears they only catch people by knocking on the door and hearing a television. They have no power of entry, and need some shred of evidence of a crime to get a warrant from a magistrate. Besides, I get the impression they can't be bothered and are quite keen on getting through their list ASAP.
BTW, you need a licence for watching television services at or nearly at the same time as it's being broadcast. This applies to using computers for that, too. But you can watch them later with no licence at all. (I don't do either, ICYWW, if I wanted to watch TV I'd have a TV).
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Vans were certainly possible - and trivial. (Score:3, Informative)
From what I've heard the detector vans were an urban myth.
While I can't state authoritatively whether the vans were a myth, the technology was real. Also simple and cheap.
Television and radio receivers of the era were all superheterodyne - down-converting a signal to a low and standard "intermediate frequency" ("IF"), where a fix-tuned amplifier/filter combination did most of the boosting and rejection of out-of-band signals before the detector stage. (Fixed-tuned filters are easier than variable-tuned an
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And advertisement agencies are charities that offer their services for free?
You have already paid for the advertisment through the inflated product price.
Why should you pay a second time in the form of wasted time?
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Yup, and for which you pay a hefty fee every year for, otherwise the detector vans come round and scan your ass (do they still have those, haven't been in Blighty for nigh on 8 years ?).
£140 a year. The alternative seems to be that the money comes out of general taxation.
It's a similar situation with the cable TV here. While they don't run "traditional" commercials as such, they still manage to interrupt the show every 15 minutes with pointless trailers for other shows which will be airing during the week.
The BBC never interrupt a show. Any trailers are shown between programmes.
SO I don't think you EVER get a full 60 minutes of programming in each hour.
You get about 58 minutes though.
08:00.00 trailer for a program
08:01.00 screen saying what's on now/next on a few channels
08:01.39 programme starts
08:59.30 programme ends
08:59.31 now/next again
They will be replaced... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Internet shaped them, the Internet can break them. Look at what happened to Napster.
Re:They will be replaced... (Score:5, Insightful)
What, so internet only media companies shouldn't be allowed to make a profit? Seriously?
You need to revise your ideas I think. If all you want is good quality free services that don't advertise, you're going to have to do them yourself, because no-one else will.
Companies that don't make a profit become one of two things, dead companies, or slowly degrading services that then get bought by larger companies.
If the latter its rare that the original appeal survives the process.
Twitter is a good example. They have no advertising, make no profits from their customers, and have millions of users. How long do you think Twitters going to last in its current form? I'd give it less than a year.
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There's no "should" to it. People are always going to try and get as much as they can for as little as they can. The opposing force is that businesses are trying to get as much money as possible for as little expense as possible. And given the internet, people are going to find ways to get free, or nearly free digital content. They're going to take pay to play content and distribute it in free fashions. They're going to take advertisement laden content and strip out the ads. These are both inevitable.
Wh
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Re:We need a spam filter for radio (Score:4, Informative)
I'd be willing to pay money for any program that filters out adds (without making too many mistakes). I've always wondered why this doesn't exist for TV.
Sorry to disappoint you, but you don't need to pay for MythTV [mythtv.org]. From the features list:
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MythTV needs constant maintenance
No. It doesn't.
and it's much less user-friendly than other TV products out there.
s/much/somewhat/ and I'll agree.
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If you're using mplayer to listen to a stream (not just audio, video can work too), look up the -dumpstream option. Then open a second instance later and just play the dump while the first instance
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How do you expect them to pay for their cost of operation, and yes, this includes reasonable salaries for their owners and employees, preferably at market rates not poverty level livings.
Do you object? Is one 15-second advert after 10-12 songs too much? Of course not.
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Pandora already offers this. A $36/yr subscription eliminates the ads.
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Re:We need a spam filter for radio (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather than looking for a third party to pay for the service of filtering Pandora ads for you, why not just subscribe to Pandora? It's $36 a year. That's $3 a month. You can afford it.
Sadly, the tone of many of the posts so far is that Pandora is now evil. That's really quite sad. They've been providing you a free service for years, while absorbing the cost of broadcast royalties.
I've been a Pandora subscriber for a while. Not so I'd get anything out of it (but as a bonus, I'm not hearing the ads), but because I believe in what they do and because they've helped me find a lot of great music.
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That's what I came here to post. My favorite station [radioparadise.com] is commercial-free and listener-supported. I encourage people to seek out stations and other business who are employing this business model and support them.
This is really the best response to the idiotic behavior of the MPAA and RIAA. Don't "steal" music and movies, support those who are offering an alternative. They can call us "thieves" all they like, but if we can point to examples like RadioPara
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That would require digitally "flagging" commercials. Or, an online database that would hold "signatures" of known commercials.
Slap that on a digital recording system that would recognize commercials either by flag or by signature - and there is your system.
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The problem with that solution is that it does not scale. If everybody did it, the broadcasters would go away.
A scalable solution would be for you and others like you to pay money to the broadcasters to not run ads.
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Don't try to hack the matrix to save 15 seconds.
Uh. Yeah. Like what he said. Friends don't let friends hack the Matrix.
Actually, I was just listening to Pandora while reading this article and reading the comments.
About halfway through the Lie to Me ad turned on. A minor interruption that sounds like
ads you see in and hear at movie theaters.
Pandora. It's a nice radio service with customization. The fact that I can pick and choose my music style
is miles better than conventional radio. With normal radio I fin
Be kind, rewind... (Score:2)
better than the alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
However, If its the same advert over and over, that will get tedious, ive played a few free versions of games that have been ad sponsored, and to have the same advert over and over is just annoying.
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if they let through enough adds to be comparable to commercial radio, then they will lose one of their attractions, and people will move onto competition, or back to commercial radio
being realistic, would you honestly rather loose pandora/lastfm/yourinternetradioofchoice rather than hear some adverts, if they are in a scenario that they arnt making enough money, and the choices are ads, fees, or closing, id choose ads every time
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History repeats itself (Score:2)
Same old half-truth. 1 second less is still "never as much as".
*Sigh* I hate advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
Another service to stop using. I'd rather pay/subscribe than listen to ads (not that the same promise didn't stop ads on cable tv). Not even regular radio interrupts songs in the middle, although a lot of obnoxiously talk into the beginning or cut off the end with their chatter. And replacing Satellite Radio with an iPhone/data_contract + Pandora seemed like a decent idea a while back.
What is it with advertising becoming so pervasive the last 50+ years that it actually ruins the medium it trojan horses itself in to the audience? On TV, the channels seem to enjoy ruining their shows with invasive in-show advertising for other crappy shows on the same channel. I cancelled my premium subscription when those sets of channels insisted on ruining all their shows, like a subtitled movie by covering the subtitles at the worst points with in-show ads. I know this is a reaction to TIVOing, but really, even with a DVR I usually just recorded something and forgot to skip ads half the time. I'd buy the DVD of that subtitled movie mentioned, but then I am forced to watch previews to "coming soon" movies that are long since gone from the theaters. Pirates are better off.
Since I was a teenager, I stopped buying branded shirts, as I refused to pay to be a walking billboard for some corp. It's weird how that became popular. And it's strange that the internet is one of the few mostly ad-free places left if the user chooses (adblock, noscript, etc) yet I bought more based on word-of-mouth there than any actual advertisement in the real world. Just seems like a giant waste of $$$ to be honest.
Hell, look at Geico commercials, at least they at least try to be entertaining. Maybe more advertising to follow the same route, becoming patrons of specific songs/etc (like in the middle ages) and actually add to the mediums rather than sabotaging them.
Re:*Sigh* I hate advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
The fundamental problem with all of this is that Pandora is advertising. The Music Labels get a service which is not super-trivial for you to download music from (by no means impossible) so that you can sample their music - since Pandora won't just let you listen to it how you want when you want, you may be compelled to buy it. Now they want to add commercials for shit I'm not listening to as well? If companies want to advertise to me on Pandora they can pay to have their songs ranked up, so that I hear them more. Instead, I have to say goodbye to Pandora at a time when I'm considering actually having enough bandwidth to use it. But since there are many non-commercial internet radio options, I guess I'll use one of those instead. Station ID bumpers are annoying enough when I'm in a groove, commercials are simply unacceptable to me. (I'm one of those annoying "I don't watch TV" fucks, but even when I did, I muted all commercials.)
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You're absolutely correct. This actually applies to lesser degrees to terrestial radio and satellite radio. Except that terrestial radio plays only the top 10/40 at any given time, which for pop is fine since it's always new crap every so often, but for anythng remotely older or niche - it becomes a repetitive cycle to an audience who has heard it for years already and since they will undoubtedly hear it again have little incentive to go and buy it anyway. Sattelite is a bit better as far as exposing the
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I really hope this never happens. I listen to pandora to find music that I like, not what the record execs want me to like.
(And yes, I use it as a music discovery service. I've bought about two albums a month from pandora's amazon affiliate link.
Have you done your part to help keep them alive?)
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Because that's called payola, and the station is legally required to disclose when they're being paid to play a song.
What I'm wondering is why Pandora hasn't set up a market research account so that record companies can gather pretty lucrative information on demographics for their music. Information that's more in-depth than radio listener counts. Information that could be anonymous: "Last month you had 602 listeners in the New York Metro area listening to Band X. This month you have 800, but Band Y has dro
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becoming patrons of specific songs/etc
You don't remember the Pepsi "Monk" song (Artist was Sev)? I am pretty sure there was a similar ad out at that time (several years ago). I remember reading a story that perhaps a new future was for products to support up and coming artist in exchange for them in the ads, making quasi-jingles, and what not.
But I haven't really seen much "product support of up and coming artist" (aside from soundtracks). Guess it didn't work out too well.
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Another service to stop using. I'd rather pay/subscribe than listen to ads (not that the same promise didn't stop ads on cable tv).
Did this "promise" ever exist? I don't remember any cable company making such a promise, nor have I found evidence that they did. I think it's one of those urban legends that belongs on Snopes.
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Google indicates my post count is about 1,700 comments although it's probably be higher. I think signed up before subscriptions (~1999) but am not entirely sure. Alway's been using no scipt and adblock since they've been available, not specifically for this site. I'm just not up-to-date on the site's
Hulu does this and everybody doesn't mind that... (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, this is no big deal. According to the article, "On average, people will hear a 15-second commercial about every two hours, Westergren said, adding that it is a targeted ad campaign and not everyone is hearing the commercials." Other 'free' services have been doing it for ages, most notably Hulu.com. Plus I agree with the above comments... fuck country-specific services on the Internet and fuck those royalty fees. And yes... I'm looking at you the most RIAA...
Re:Hulu does this and everybody doesn't mind that. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this is the internet we're talking about, but Hulu went live ~1.5 years ago and has only been accessible to the general public for less than a year (March 12, 2008). They haven't been doing anything "for ages".
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I know this is the internet we're talking about, but Hulu went live ~1.5 years ago and has only been accessible to the general public for less than a year (March 12, 2008). They haven't been doing anything "for ages".
Fair enough, I just chose a website that does this and is widely used by the general public.
Music is being advertised on radio (Score:2, Interesting)
Why advertise anything else?
People hear music, like it, buy the CD or visit the concert.
Once upon a time, children.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me tell you a fictional bedtime story, kids. Once upon a time there were these cable TV services that were popular because they had no commercials! Then, like an evil virus, commercials started slowly creeping in, so slowly people didn't notice the prick of the blade at first....
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And the people who subscribed to cable because it was ad-free did not immediately call the cable company and cancel their service because of the ads.
Headline over the top (Score:5, Insightful)
These commercial breaks are not 'invasive'. Somebody groping you on the street on your way to work is invasive. You can still choose not to listen to web radio.
Re:Headline over the top (Score:5, Funny)
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It sounds as if they were, in the sense of not only interrupting the regular program, but actually songs right in the middle.
I'd call that "invasive". It would make me change station.
Spotify does this too. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, and I'm happy to pay the BBC license fee for ad-free OTA broadcasting.
That's OK (Score:3, Informative)
They get their ad revenue for sending them, not for you listening.
Filtering them out can't be too hard and won't cost them. Just like AdBlock downloads the ads but doesn't display them.
Re: (Score:2)
AdBlock downloads the ads? Gah, what a huge waste of bandwidth that is when you're on dialup and paying per minute. Surely this should be configurable?
It is.
Blame The Major Labels... (Score:2)
Blame the major recording labels and their bought-and-paid-for congress-critters. This is purely the result of the major content producers'/distributors' attempts to kill off internet radio because they don't control it. This isn't about copyright, royalties, or any of that noise. It's about controlling distribution and what people see/hear. If they can't control it, they'll try everything they can to kill it.
Also, expect many countries outside the US to eventually follow along as treaties are signed to "ha
Balls in a vice (Score:2)
The RIAA wants nothing less than 100% control over every distribution outlet for their cont
Sorry Pandora, it's been fun (Score:3, Insightful)
I have been using Pandora for years and have found a few new artists by using it, and I know they have struggled to make a profit, but this is the end for me. Besides the ads they have also shortened the time you can just listen tremendously now stopping the music and popping up the "Are you still listening?" dialog every 5 minutes.
Pandora is a company/project that could be profitable in so many creative ways but the asshats behind it seem to only know intrusive ads in one way or another. It is a classic case of tunnel vision and a complete lack of creativity and effort.
I plan on emailing them my thoughts before just disappearing, and I'd urge anyone who uses it to do the same.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
On second thought, everyone should donate; that's the only way to get around t
So? (Score:3, Insightful)
I Subscribed (Score:2)
If you're listening free, then realize that it has to be subsidized by someone. That means ads.
Do yourself a favor. Subscribe. It's really worth the money. Probably the best 36 bucks I've spent this year.
Imag0
Re:Can't be accessed outside of US (Score:5, Informative)
"We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative."
plus there are plenty of alternatives that do work, i use lastfm in the uk, works ace
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
That would be taking responsibility. Instead blame the corporations and the government black helicopters for forcing you to buy things you might actually want and derive pleasure from.