Pandora makes for an interesting model for music marketing, for sure.

I bet in a few years, we will see all music sold as subscription based content and so long as one continues to pay 'licensing fees' each month, the tap will keep flowing. You won't really get to 'own' your music so much as pay for continued access to it.

(Kindle looks to be much the same.)

The artists will get marginalized again, being forced to go through giant clearing houses to get their content included in the big services' content base - direct artist purchasing will be tougher, because it will require the efforts of fans to seek it out and try to integrate it with their congolmerate-ized other music. Maybe we'll see proprietary formats for each service to try and re-monopolize the providing of content. Artists won't be able to provide music for certain delivery services without allowing the service to siphon off cash.

Picture buying an iPod with a monthly fee for "unlimited music enjoyment" that will not allow you to put in an artist's music who does not have a content provider deal with Apple.

Kind of trying to tour without Tickemaster - another model of middlemen insinuating themselves into the artist/fan relationship in order to parasitize it.

If The Beatles don't have a licensing agreement with a given service, you won't even be able to download your Beatles CD's onto the device. Hard copies of your music will become landlocked.

Buddha, I think Pandora is more a victim of the record companies' licensing scams, rather than a part of it. For example, they can't operate in the UK because the licensing fees are too high. So they have to block non-US users by IP.

After reading selfdivider's post that started this thread, I thought I'd give Pandora another try. When I first heard about it a few years ago, I could only listen to it on my cheesy computer speakers, so I couldn't get interested. I had a Squeezebox hooked up to my main system back then, but its SlimServer software didn't support Pandora at that time. Since then, my Squeezebox died and I just hooked up a computer into my main system, driving a Benchmark DAC. This turned out to be a big plus.

I must say I'm completely amazed by this thing. I defined a radio station based on a favorite song of mine, "Ceora" by Lee Morgan (one of my "desert island" songs). There were a few false starts where I gave the thumbs down to some "pure Bossa Nova" tracks and it figured out I liked stuff that, in its language, has "classic jazz roots". After that, it developed an uncanny ability to pick out stuff I liked. Within about an hour of each other, it picked out "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" by Sonny Rollins, which happens to be my favorite track on the album in which it appears. Then it played, "Le Coiffeur" by Dexter Gordon, which happens to be my favorite song on "Gettin' Around" - which also happens to be my favorite Dexter Gordon album. It's finding patterns in what I like that I wasn't able to figure out before, and indeed it baffles me to think about them. I found out that I like a "groove-oriented approach" and "mid-tempo dance rhythms" among other things. It describes the drumming of Billy Higgins as "riff-oriented rhythms" - which makes sense if you think about it.

The free service gives you 40 listening hours a month, and the pay service is $36 per year for unlimited hours and 192k bitrate. That seems like a fair price to me. Hell, several of the internet radio stations I listen to have gotten really obnoxious with the begathons. I'd rather pay Pandora a small amount up front to STFU for a year. Since I started experimenting with it, I haven't listened to the music on my hard drive at all. Basically, it's better at picking out music I like than I am at picking out tracks to play from my hard drive. The trick is that much of what it picks out is stuff I never heard before.

After thinking about what I just wrote, I realized that my post came across like I am some kind of industry toady similar to a Stereophile writer! Maybe I should start a career as a professional whistler.

I have had Rhapsody for a few years and love it.
I have thousands of cd's in Rhapsody at a cost of 15 per month.

I have discovered so many new artists at a fraction of what it would take to buy only one of their CDs.

The ones I like the most I buy the physical CD.

It's a great way to discover new music.

However I would hate it if the option to own a CD vanished. I look on a subscription service as a way to find out what I really want to buy.

I think Pandora is better to discover music but they have not much in old sung Flamenco music (I don't care about the dance part) which I love and nothing in African music like Akli Farka Toure of Mali or those guys from Senegal. I am hooked to Pandora. You feel like a retard playing vinyl after Pandora.

Quote:
You feel like a retard playing vinyl after Pandora.

not me, Frog, not me. Speak for yerself, eh?>

If Gordon Holt had not sold his magazine Stereophile would have stopted long ago romanticizing its readers about turntables for marketing purposes and we would be reading in dept articles about pros and cons of Pandora. While the old guard has mostly given up on turntables Stereophile now is into conning newbies into buying a turntable.