Pandora Trying Out Invasive Commercial Breaks

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.'"

Comments

Re:Can't be accessed outside of US

[wjh31]

Its not really pandoras fault in this case, if you go to their home page.

"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

Hulu does this and everybody doesn't mind that...

[Vertana]

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:We need a spam filter for radio

[xlotlu]

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. From the features list:

• Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping, with manual correction via an intuitive cutlist editor.

Re:Whatever, it's a great service

[digitig]

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/ for instance.

Re:Whatever, it's a great service

[davester666]

> 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...