Slashdot Mirror
Pandora Stabilizes, No Longer Completely Free
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."
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 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.
theyre opening their own box... which sounds dirty.
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.
I guess a one time fee of $0.99 isn't too much to ask. I do have over that with the change in my pocket from my two coffees I go this morning.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Pandora was available in Canada.
"[...] one-time fee [...] unlimited listening [...] for a month"
Gee, Unlimited and one-time sure aren't what they used to be..
If you pay, are you still forced to listen to music you don't like?
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.
Piracy Tips for Consumers, I was reading the "royalty rates" link and saw that the RIAA was behind it, so I went to their website and found this jewel.
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?
I for one will not be using Pandora anymore if they decide that I ought to be charged. I am clearly not at all opposed to the fee, 99 cents is dirt cheap for what you get from Pandora. What worries me about all this micropayment nonsense is having to give out my credit card number ALL THE FRAKKIN TIME. I hate giving out my CC number. This is an especially large concern for Windows users, where keyloggers are rampant. When people get more and more used to giving out their CC numbers, you can expect phishing to become even more prevalent than it already is. I don't want to have to pay for everything I see and use on the web. It is obnoxious. Even if the price is more than worth it in the actual dollars and cents definition of the word, it is still not worth HAVING to pay for it. At least that is my $0.02 (which you all now owe me btw, please reply with your credit card number).
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
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.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
A thought about this. I know that the rates charged by credit card companies to process a transaction tend to be very high. Does anyone know how the pricing structure works? How much of the final transaction will actually be paid to Pandora?
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.
This comes on the same day that an agreement was announced that lowers royalty payments for internet radio stations. The original plan called for royalties of 0.19 cents per streamed song. The new plan sets royalties for large stations at 25% of revenue or .14 cents/song (whichever is greater). Small stations will pay $25,000/yr or 12-14% of revenue (whichever is greater). It sounds like it's still going to be impossible for individuals to set up stations as a hobby, which I guess it was practical to do at one point, but I'm guessing that a lot of college radio stations might find it cheaper to pay the $25k/yr than to maintain an FM broadcast station.
Find free books.
I suppose I should sign up for another account for use on my Blackberry, one for my wife, and another one for my home laptop.
Pandora lets you share your stations with other users, so I wont even lose my new stations. Although lately I seem to get the same 100 songs over and over, so it's time to create some new stations anyway.
My friend got a e-mail from pandora saying she was in their top 10% of listeners.
She said they "let [her] down easy" and gave her alternative "solutions" to deal with capped listening times.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Do none of you use http://www.slacker.com/? I started with Pandora, but I find Slacker far superior. It is free with ads and has a paid subscription with no ads. The channels are more professionally programmed, so I don't get the odd song thrown in that just doesn't fit the chosen genre in the least.
If the wrong people hear you, it will spell the end of the most obvious work-around.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My primary concern with low-cost services, is that of transactional security. I don't want to expose my CC to compromise over only 1$. Paypal is just as bad. if I subscribe to 100 1$ services per month, how much does that increase my exposure, vs one transaction for 100$? low cost webservices may be the answer to making money online, but I'm not here so a provider can make a buck.
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...
Here's the email I received from Pandora: Hi, itâ(TM)s Tim - I hope this email finds you enjoying a great summer Pandora soundtrack. Iâ(TM)m writing with some important news. Please forgive the lengthy email; it requires some explaining. First, I want to let you know that weâ(TM)ve reached a resolution to the calamitous Internet radio royalty ruling of 2007. After more than two precarious years, we are finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates â" thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our listeners who voiced an absolute avalanche of support for us on Capitol Hill. We are deeply thankful. While we did the best we could to lower the rates, we are going to have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the web. Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising alone. Most listeners will never hit this cap, but it seems that you might. We hate the idea of capping anyone's usage, so we've been working to devise an alternative for listeners like you. We've come up with two solutions and we hope that one of them will work for you: Your first option is to continue listening just as you have been and, if and when you reach the 40 hour limit in a given month, to pay just $0.99 for unlimited listening for the rest of that month. This isn't a subscription. You can pay by credit card and your card will be charged for just that one month. You'll be able to keep listening as much as you'd like for the remainder of the month. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable - the same price as a single song download. Your second option is to upgrade to our premium version called Pandora One. Pandora One costs $36 per year. In addition to unlimited monthly listening and no advertising, Pandora One offers very high quality 192 Kbps streams, an elegant desktop application that eliminates the need for a browser, personalized skins for the Pandora player, and a number of other features: http://www.pandora.com/pandora_one. If neither of these options works for you, I hope you'll keep listening to the free version - 40 hours each month will go a long way, especially if you're really careful about hitting pause when youâ(TM)re not listening. Weâ(TM)ll be sure to let you know if you start getting close to the limit, and weâ(TM)ve created a counter you can access to see how many hours youâ(TM)ve already used each month. Weâ(TM)ll be implementing this change starting this month (July), Iâ(TM)d welcome your feedback and suggestions. The combination of our usage patterns and the "per song per listener" royalty cost creates a financial reality that we can't ignore...but we very much want you to continue listening for years to come. Please don't hesitate to email me back with your thoughts. Sincerely, Tim Founder
Maybe I'm over-looking something here, but couldn't you just create additional free accounts? Yes, I'm that cheap...
http://www.Last.fm does all the stuff Pandora does, and more. With no ads. I don't know how they do it, but they do and I listen to it all day @ work. Oh yeah, it's free too. Cmon people.
the problem with the micropayments is that the CC companies charge enough for a processing fee that the micropayments are really as micro as they could be. If the CC company charges 0.50 for the transaction, then this really could be a .50 per month thing.... what you need is some service which can agregate all the things you want to pay via micropayment type systems (podcasts or blogs that you contribute for, pandora or other music services, etc) and then tack on a small fee for doing this and then pay the "subscriptions" minus the credit card fee, basically do what they do now, but be less greedy.... Why pay $1 to each of 10 services per month when the credit card companies take half that in transaction fees. Why not pay microPayPal or whoever, $7 and let them keep $2, but contribute the $0.50 to each of those 10 services. Pandora or whoever would get the same amount of money in the end, a single aggregation service that handles this could make a nice chunk on the 20% surcharge, and the consumer would save 30% in the end. If they are doing this for enough services like Pandora, they would even recognize savings by the fact that THEY make a single $10,000 payment to Pandora each month for the 20,000 people using the service and still only pay the single payment processing fee, even if they pay by credit card. Sounds like a pretty simple business to start, it would only be an issue of getting enough "customers" who would trust this middleman service, which is why it would be perfect grounds for GoogleCheckout or PayPal to jump on now and claim the segment.
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 --
Respect the Constitution
We can only listen to Pandora online music for free for close to 5.5% of a month. If you factor out sleeping (assuming most techies get 6 hours) we can get close to 7.5% of our month in free music! Can't wait till February rolls around and we can get close to 8% of our month!! Who really cares about paying a dollar for music, thanks Pandora for not ripping us off like itunes.
Of course this is only a correction to the article if you belive that this still means Pandora is available to all the world, as some US citizens seem to belive... Sorry for spilling my guts like this but I'm profoundly tired of that particular issue, and I realise not everyone in the US like that.
Excerpt from pandora.com
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.
As far as music sites go, Pandora's functionality is one of the most limited out there.
Sites like deezer.com or songza.com offer the ability both to search for all the individual songs you want and create a playlist + it allows you to create a random radio.
Pandora is full of itself if it think it's worth any money.
Why do delusional apple fanbois have to hijack any and all discussions?
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..."
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.
And it is the one with the license that makes the copy.
If the RIAA wants to make it "the one making the copy available needs the license" then they had better pay back AllOfMP3, since they had a license to create the copy they sold.
And Jammie now has a license to distribute 24 tracks...
I use Pandora about 8 hours per day. Mainly when I'm at work. Although I really wouldn't mind paying $.99c for 3 more weeks of this service, I can't really see myself doing it.
I'm curious if the old mobile apps (iPhone, BBerry, etc) are going to continue to work. If so then there is at least one way to get around this cap.
For folks who can't access Pandora, have a look at Spotify. It's a similar idea to Pandora, but gives you more control over which tracks you listen to. I don't like it's "artist radio" as much as I like Pandora's stations/channels, but building playlists more than makes up for it. It runs in a client rather than a browser; works perfectly for me on Mac (10.4) and Kubuntu 8.10 (running inside WINE).
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 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.
Pandora doesn't play what you want to hear. It plays what IT thinks you want you to hear.
If I'm going to pay, I want on-demand listening of specific songs out of a VERY large library.
Napster is only $5/month. No ads, unlimited listening, and I can choose which songs I want to play.
I like Pandora, but I'd rather have a couple extra audio ads inserted in for the free version.
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.
Not trolling. I've never used it. But why is this used vs. shoutcast servers?
Ad-supported site PLUS paying and still getting bombarded with ads?
Later, Pandora. Your project was nice while it wasn't commercial. People are going to wonder why they suddenly can't listen to Pandora, and I'm going to tel anyone on my network why I've got that site filtered.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I've personally found Pandora to be underwhelming. It just reminds me of the old saying, "if you want something done right you have to do it yourself," which seems to be doubly true for anything that's a matter of taste. Pandora tries to quantify taste, but the problem is that taste is not quantifiable.
When presented with new music, I'll see something like "we picked this song because we noticed that you like heavy guitar riffs and a pulsing bass drum." Which is about as meaningless as saying "we picked this match for you because she has great breasts." While I may strongly favor women who fall into that category, it doesn't narrow things down enough, while simultaneously presuming I don't like variety by excluding women with a great smile and a sense of humor. Finding music you like is no different.. although fortunately music pretty much never gets jealous when you listen to other music, or decides it's not interested, or bleeds for a week without dying. Anyway, the only way I've seen to get variety out of Pandora is to create multiple "stations", and if I have to constantly switch "stations" throughout a listening experience, I might as well create the playlists myself or just throw in a few CDs and explore each of them.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
No one mentioned this jewel yet, you also must keep 4 years of detailed server logs (who listened to what when, etc.) and provide them to the agency managing the royalty payments. If you don't want to keep and submit detailed logs, you can pay an additional fee to get out of most of this reporting requirement (a 'proxy fee' amount unspecified).
The $25,000 minimum fee completely closes webcasting to all but large professional players, which is bad for music. The claim to gross revenues of all activities related to the website makes it impossible for businesses to run webcasts b/c soundsafe will tap into the businesses' gross (bad for web developers). Even without the $25k minimum the royalty rates are outrageous (coming up on 1 cent per song per listener by 2015 - and 14 cents per song per listener for some types of stations (make your own playlists).
It used to be music, then it was the music business, now it's just business. Such a shame.
closed minded is as closed minded does
Let me know when it stops pretending that national borders are meaningfull on the internet.
So I listen to SOMAFM.COM
And Radio Paradise.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I tried it. Have it on my iphone. I never use it anymore. When I heard they were putting ads into the songs and that you could be interrupted mid song I laughed and decided to cease all use.
Even if they corrected the situation they don't seem to understand. I don't listen to internet radio for the ads. I listen for the music. There are other ways to make money. You don't need to ad subsidize everything. Find another way.
I have no problem with minimal fees. In fact, I use Last.fm. Not always, but semi-frequently. I pay them the $3.00 a month not because I have to but because I want them to survive and feed me solid music without the ads.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
IT'S CALLED NYQUIST'S THEOREM - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquistâ"Shannon_sampling_theorem go look it up please! (re: vinyl is "infinite kbps - it's more like 32 kbps, in between FM Radio and CD's! go read about it!
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Weird, I just subscribed to Pandora last week. Well, I guess it's not that weird. It's something though.
Come back to us!
You should PAY radio stations to play your music, thus making it free to listeners. A song is a commercial for your album and tour. Facilitate getting what you want (heard, sold) by making it easy for us.
i'm going to listen to Pandora less now, or maybe not at all. Your commercials were annoying enough. Your station is nothing BUT commercials, really. So why are you making me listen to MORE ads? Why the hell should i PAY to listen to ads? Charge the bands, charge the labels. Integrate with iTunes and give a discount for purchases. This will establish the connection between giving us what we want for free and us buying stuff.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
is create 4 accts, 1 for each week of the month?