Pandora Stabilizes, No Longer Completely Free 268
AbyssWyrm writes "Yesterday, Pandora founder Tim Westergren announced that the music service was on safe ground once again, but will no longer be free for all users. Instead, it will be really cheap — for those with a free account, there will be a cap of 40 hours per month, and a user may pay a one-time fee of $0.99 to resume unlimited listening to music for a month. According to the blog entry, this will affect the top 10% of listeners. Certainly not a bad deal considering the price, and I suspect that Pandora is one of few free internet resources whose users are loyal enough to pay a small fee to keep it afloat. Pandora's future had been uncertain ever since the royalty rates for internet radio were increased in 2007."
non-us? (Score:2)
Now that they have payment model instructed too, why not expand it outside US aswell? Last.FM radio has something similar too, they had to start charging non-US/CA/UK users because there wasn't enough advertisers in other countries to make it profitable. That being said, we have that awesome Spotify [spotify.com] here, but I'm sure there would be lots of old non-US Pandora users that would pay a little to listen to it again.
Re:non-us? (Score:5, Informative)
Probably because the scope of the agreement with copyright owners doesn't extend to use beyond the US; my understanding from what I've read about it is that it specifies a licensing fee that includes a portion of US revenues in exchange for allowing internet streaming of the music in the US.
I guess (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's more complicated than that though.
It's a one-time fee if you go over 40 hours in a month, and then you get unlimited listening for that month. You have to pay again if you go over 40 hours of listening in the next month. But if you stay under 40 hours, it's free.
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Re:I guess (Score:5, Funny)
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It's not so much the gum as the amazing comics they come with.
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The reason is because Pandora has to pay royalties per play while RF gets a free pass. They've spent the last two years fighting this in congress, and this fee is the fallout from the most recent royalty settlement which still leaves them with the highest royalties of all radio formats.
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RF version of Pandora? Cool! What's the frequency? And how to I create new stations and rate the songs?
I wish... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:I wish... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes... he is
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Well, I believe they've made a mistake. Data shouldn't care where you are geographically, in almost every instance.
Licensing contracts however do care, because they can.
For the good of all of us except for those who are dead.
Skip as many songs as we want? (Score:2)
One of the reasons I never used Pandora was that unless I made a new playlist, I couldn't skip songs after a little while.
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Not sure about that. I can't listen at work anymore, but I used to have Pandora on all day. You could skip something like 3 songs in a 15 minute period or 6 songs an hour. And with the rating system you could filter out bad music rather easily. And if you ever just got tired of a song there is the "ZZZ" button to remove the song from your play list for 30 days.
Pandora had it's issues. Like I hate listening to live recordings, which I know is one of the tags that they mark songs with. But I couldn't just set
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Easy fix, be less picky
If I was a less picky, I wouldn't need Pandora, eh?
Have you read this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of note: Watch for Compilations that are "Too Good to Be True". Why are they too good to be true? If customers would want that compilation why haven't you sold it to them?
Even better: Trust your ear: The sound quality of pirate CDs is often poor or inconsistent. It is a freaking digital copy, it is the exact same quality! Does anyone actually believe this stuff?
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Even if you don’t illegally offer recordings to others, you join a file-sharing network and download unauthorized copies of all the copyrighted music you want for free from the computers of other network members.
If I own the CD's, but don't have software to burn them, don't I have the right to download the songs off a P2P network? I purchased the right to have a backup copy, does i
Re:Have you read this? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an even worse one in there. How about:
Furthermore, if the record label listed is a company you've never heard of, that should be another warning sign.
That sounds to me like it's bordering on an anti-trust violation, smearing the smaller non-RIAA music labels as illegitimate and illegal. I haven't bought any RIAA CDs in years because they've been acting like dickwads, but even before they started acting like dickwads most of the CDs I bought *were* from record labels I'd never heard of. I did buy some "top 40 pop" stuff, but for the most part the RIAA labels just didn't carry what I wanted, and the "unheard of" indie labels did.
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Music pirates aren't in the music business, they are in the plastics business. They buy and sell plastic and get consumers to pay them 10 to 20 times their cost for a blank disc by simply loading that plastic up with stolen music.
That argument applies almost verbatim to the music industry itself.
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This whole "license" thing is just your imagination. It doesn't exist. When you buy a CD you bought that single physical copy, that's it.
So yes, that makes all those other uses probably copyright infringement. Does it matter? Not really. Copyright law is best ignored.
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Here is something even non-pirates have done at least once in there life:
You have a computer with a CD burner, which you use to burn copies of music you have downloaded onto writable CDs for all of your friends.
So you mean that since the days of cassette tapes every person who has made their girlfriend/boyfriend a mix tape or mix CD is in violation of the law? It must be true, the RIAA says so.
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So you mean that since the days of cassette tapes every person who has made their girlfriend/boyfriend a mix tape or mix CD is in violation of the law? It must be true, the RIAA says so.
Well, actually, yeah.
Re:Have you read this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Too Good To Be True == 200 tracks for $2. They didn't sell that because they don't want to give stuff away so cheaply. How is that hard to understand?
Maybe, maybe not. I've never heard a pirate CD, but I've seen plenty of pirate DVDs. Some are direct digital copies of the original and look great, plenty are just burned torrent downloads (and so have compression artifacts everywhere). Some are screen cams. I'm sure the same holds for audio.
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Too Good To Be True == 200 tracks for $2. They didn't sell that because they don't want to give stuff away so cheaply. How is that hard to understand?
Read the link, it says nothing about number of tracks or price, only about the diversity of the artists.
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One time fee? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to be a terrible pedant, but if you pay a "one time fee" to get unlimited listening each month, it's not a one-time fee. It's a monthly fee. It just has a very low subscription cost.
Re:One time fee? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a subscription, though, because you don't have to pay it every month. If you go over the limit in a month, the fee really is one time to get more Pandora that month. You won't be charged the next month unless you go over the limit again and want to listen again. I agree it's not a "lifetime" membership for a one-time fee, but it's not a subscription either. Maybe they should just drop the qualifier and call it a "$1 fee".
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It's not a subscription, though, because you don't have to pay it every month.
If you want to listen for more than 40 hours a month you sure as heck do. :)
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Cost per transaction? (Score:2, Interesting)
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In Sweden, the charge is around $0.4 per transaction. I think.
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MATHx314, is it?
Possibly great news for them (Score:2)
The reason I never signed up to begin with was that I figured the music licensing cartel would drive them out of business before long. Now I'll go check it out.
lower royalty rates negotiated (Score:4, Interesting)
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Unbelievable. The broadcasters "negotiated" to give away a minimum of 25% of their revenue for nothing in return, and they're falling over themselves thanking the extortionists for the privilege? This is insanity.
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surely it's about time the OSS movement learned how to do HollyWood Accounting [wapedia.mobi]
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e-mail (Score:2)
She said they "let [her] down easy" and gave her alternative "solutions" to deal with capped listening times.
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Slacker? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do none of you use http://www.slacker.com/ [slacker.com]? I started with Pandora, but I find Slacker far superior. It is free with ads and has a paid subscription with no ads. The channels are more professionally programmed, so I don't get the odd song thrown in that just doesn't fit the chosen genre in the least.
Re:Slacker? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's a matter of taste. I prefer Pandora to Slacker. Especially since Pandora's new Blackberry app doesn't choke my BB 8310 like the Slacker app did. Looking at both sites they both have adds but the Slacker site "feels" like it is trying to sell me stuff. Kinda like I just stepped onto a used car lot. There are things I like/dislike on both but I just like Pandora more.
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price is right, now how do I hand them a dollar (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/prepaid/index.html [visa.com]
http://www.mastercard.com/us/personal/en/aboutourcards/prepaid/index.html [mastercard.com]
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You can use a Virtual Credit Card [consumerreports.org] number, which is a temporary credit card which is tied to your main CC account. I believe both Visa and Mastercard offer these, or it's issued by the bank who issued your credit card.
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The price is right but the money ends up being used to sue helpless people to oblivion. I stopped spending money on any music years ago because of that.
As for the credit card thing: if your credit card number was compromised you just report it (they'll probably catch it before you do anyway) within 60 days, they mail you a new card, and that's it. My experience with doing this has been painless and taken only a couple minutes. You aren't responsible, and can't be, for any fraudulent charges [ftc.gov]. No liability, n
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Usage and profit negatively correlated? (Score:3, Interesting)
I know there must be a good, albeit esoteric explanation for this, but the economics behind this decision are baffling to me. One would think that if Pandora had a profitable business model, then profit and listeners' usage of their service should be positively correlated; i.e., the more I listen, the more profit Pandora makes from advertising. However, if they're encouraging people to use the service less, the obvious explanation would be that usage and profit are negatively correlated; i.e., Pandora would be hemorraging money.
It's as if Sony were to suddenly decide to cap the number of PS3's you can buy to limit their losses...
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Welcome to the '90s! (Score:2)
Reminds me of the days when bandwidth was *really* expensive and Biz Dev Guys were cheap:
Meetings with new site managers went something like this:
"The Good News: Traffic is 500 times more than predicted; The Bad News: Traffic is 500 times more than predicted..."
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Well, I imagine the 40 hour cap approaches some limit in the advertising in which the advertisements become less effective, and the advertisers are not willing to pay the same rate. I'll bet the advertisers are willing to pay more to have an advertisement come on right when a user logs onto Pandora, but the longer you're logged in perhaps you're less likely to click on an ad or be affected by an ad, because you're just listening to music(or you left the room). So, Pandora probably calculated a threshold at
Top Listener Email (Score:3, Informative)
still free, slightly more annoyingly so (Score:2, Insightful)
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Say what again (Score:3, Insightful)
one-time fee of $0.99 to resume unlimited listening to music for a month
How is it you pay a one time fee for a monthly service?
Should it be:
-- OR --
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It doesn't automatically happen the next month...
That does it! (Score:5, Funny)
As a top ten percent user, this is it, the final straw. I'll pay the whole $3 a month for premium service. I hope they're happy, they've converted me from a non-paying user to a paid subscriber.
I hit the 40 hours probably the first week of every month, I require a soundtrack to be able to program, and Pandora works wonders for me.
Spotify (Score:3, Informative)
The one con relative to Pandora is that Spotify has audio ads; I've never counted but it's something like one 10 second ad every 10 songs. Not perfect, but much better than listening to a real radio station. On the upside, you can pay for a day or a month of ad-free listening.
There's also Magnatune [magnatune.com] which is a good source of DRM-free independant music. Not great as a radio station, as the free streaming is very basic, but I've got some good music from them.
Not a bad deal... (Score:3, Insightful)
When I first saw the headline, I thought "Oh shit - one of the few free music apps that works perfectly and actually has good content is now going to be ruined;" not because I have any objection to paying a fair price for things, but because historically with free music sites/services online, once money becomes involved they change, and usually not for the better.
However, I find this pricing model pretty appropriate - if you are listening over 40 hours a month, 99 cents is a small price to pay to support the site. This doesn't look to me like a way to exploit their userbase for huge economic gains, rather, it looks like a site doing what they need to do to survive without taking advantage of their user base.
If they raise it substantially, quickly - I might feel differently, but from what I understand they were having to deal with this seems like a pretty good way to go - managable and fair, and only affecting heavy users.
Re:Ads & paid use (Score:5, Funny)
It is unprecedented. People will never pay for a service which also includes ads, unless you count magazines, newspapers, cable TV, movies, and riding the bus.
And yes, 99 cents per month for a service you use for dozens of hours is an outrage. The price jumped from $0.00 to $0.99 just today. If this trend continues, the service will cost over $300/month after just one year. Let's all get really mad!
Re:Ads & paid use (Score:5, Insightful)
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Let me be the first to say:
http://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
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Jinks, you owe me a coke.
Adjudication: improper invocation by invalid spelling. Debt canceled.
Re:Ads & paid use (Score:5, Funny)
It seems typing the line "Let me be the first to say:" cost you being the first to say. The guy above you didn't use any fancy extra line breaks and got there first!
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Re:Ads & paid use (Score:5, Insightful)
It's because ad supported doesn't actually work for any decent-sized service.
TANSTAAFL. So suck it up and pay something if you enjoy it.
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Those guys pretty much exist to sell ads, and with the exception of Google, their revenues have been shrinking for decades. Additionally, with the traditional media sources, your ad revenue was augmented by regional local advertising on which you hold a geographic monopoly: that does not hold true for the internet, so the ads are much less lucrative.
Google makes up for it with an extremely high ability to target the ads, and by doing insane volume. Other sites have slim pickings in comparison.
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It's because ad supported doesn't actually work for any decent-sized service.
"Traditionnal" web ads that users have to click for them to generate revenue for the site may not work, but I think advertisers are (or will be) paying good money for one of Spotify's audio ads (in between songs, just like on radio). And they are more annoying than blockable text/image/flash ads, so they are a "better" insentive for the user to suscribe to the service (or to switch service, but if they manage to stay ahead of the competition most users will pay or continue waiting through the ads I guess).
Re:Ads & paid use (Score:5, Informative)
Why is it that we have to pay for a service that is ad based too? It might start with $0.99/month. Before you know it, it will be $5/month.. etc.
**The following is not a shameless plug, but it sure as shit reads like one.**
Why not just upgrade to their 'Pandora One' subscription plan for $36/year ($3/month)? It eliminates ads entirely, includes unlimited listening, higher-quality 192 kbps streams, and some other random stuff. Doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.
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Vinyl level sound is infinite kbps because it's analog, there are no frames. Digital has better dynamic range, but for frequency reproduction nothing can touch analog. That being said, you get more predictable results with digital, a better noise floor, and the aforementioned dynamic range.
The "vinyl level" sound is much higher quality in at least one measurable respect, bass reproduction. That's why in a world class club, with a world class DJ, they will be using vinyl even if nobody there but the DJ can t
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'zactly. Just paid my $36 a few days ago. I don't think $3/month is at all unreasonable. Still would like to skip a bit more, but hey. I can still pop over to Imeem or Deezer.
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* Skip All Day Long: With the standard ad supported version of Pandora you're limited to 12 total skips per day. With Pandora One you'll be able to skip as many times per day as you'd like (note you will still be limited, thanks to licensing constraints, to six skips per hour).
I rarely skip when something sucks... I just switch stations.
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Re:Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fail (Score:4, Insightful)
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Pre-paid card.
Card with a low limit.
You don't exactly have to use your Black AMEX for Pandora if you're that worried about it...
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Micropayment? Err, pay a year at a time. its 12 bucks. This is just like satellite radio. No one pays monthly, they pay quarterly or annually. Relax dude.
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paypal?
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Oh noes you have to pay all of 99 cents if you listen to over 40 hours in one month! Those dirty fiends!
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It's the start of the slippery slope.
So you'd rather them be unable to come back rather than having to chip in 99 cents because otherwise they won't be able to afford the licensing fees?
Compare cable bills from the 80s to today. $10 package back then is now around $80. We have more adverts, bigger channel logos, obnoxious animated or video overlays showing other programming over the top of whatever you're watching, and channels constantly being spun off into other sub-packages that cost more in monthly fees to get them back.
Waaaaaaaaaah. Poor baby.
Maybe when you grow up you'll have to start paying for services rather than stealing them, and then you'll discover pricing always vastly outstrips inflation increases.
I don't steal anything now or have in the past. I pay for everything I get. To complain about 99 cents for listening to over 40 hours of music from the service so they can cover their licensing fees is laughable. I love the condescension to when you're the one who is tossing out the "WAAAH I HAVE TO PAY FOR THINGS" argument not me.
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English failing? The fee is one-time since it is non-recurring. And it's not (unlimited) (for one month). It's (unlimited for one month)
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Shhhhhh.... (Score:2)
If the wrong people hear you, it will spell the end of the most obvious work-around.
Re:time to sign up for another account (Score:4, Insightful)
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What do you mean ripping off? iTunes charges you $0.99 for a song you then own (without DRM). Pandora charges you $0.99 for a stream you are not allowed to record and can't take with you on your MP3 player. They are two different business models. One is a store, the other one is a radio station.