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: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...