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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.
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.
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!
Pandora was available in Canada.
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.
Always Relevant: XKCD
Let me be the first to say:
http://xkcd.com/605/
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
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
Jinks, you owe me a coke.
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!
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.
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 ($3/month)? It eliminates ads entirely, includes unlimited listening, higher-quality 192 kbps streams, and some other random stuff. Doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.
My friend got a e-mail from pandora saying she was in their top 10% of listeners.
She said they "let [her] down easy" and gave her alternative "solutions" to deal with capped listening times.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Yeah! Like .... radio, and network television, and google... and.
1368127 is prime!
Scary. I thought the exact same thing when I read parent comment, as was about to go get the XKCD link =)
Oh noes you have to pay all of 99 cents if you listen to over 40 hours in one month! Those dirty fiends!
Do none of you use http://www.slacker.com/? I started with Pandora, but I find Slacker far superior. It is free with ads and has a paid subscription with no ads. The channels are more professionally programmed, so I don't get the odd song thrown in that just doesn't fit the chosen genre in the least.
If the wrong people hear you, it will spell the end of the most obvious work-around.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My primary concern with low-cost services, is that of transactional security. I don't want to expose my CC to compromise over only 1$. 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.
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).
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...
It's $3/month with no ads, higher quality streams, and unlimited use.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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)
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
I gotta ask. You guys always seem to post first.
Q: Do you subscribe (pay) for the slashdot premium service?
-jp
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
'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.
Maybe I'm over-looking something here, but couldn't you just create additional free accounts? Yes, I'm that cheap...
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.
So they don't let you skip more than a few songs an hour even if you have the paid subscription?
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
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.
Yes it is recurring, because you have to pay it every month to be able to listen to > 40 hours / month.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Nope. Usually an obsessive-compulsive F5 finger on the homepage works.
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..."
Jsut press "F5" if you've used up all of your skips and you want to load a new song. :-)
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
It's not recurring in that you don't have to agree to automatic repeat billing until you cancel or agree a minimum subscription term or indeed every pay it again.
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.
I thought maybe you guys got in early by using the firehose phase or moderating phase or some trick I was unaware of. Its nice to hear you are just compulsive such as I...
* 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.
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Jinks, you owe me a coke.
Adjudication: improper invocation by invalid spelling. Debt canceled.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
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.
A recurring payment is something that automatically happens based on a cycle of time. This is not a recurring payment because one may not always listen to 40 hours/month and as such they won't get billed anything.
Adjudication accepted, you're right.
See #4.
You're an idiot. 192 is 'higher quality' than 128. That's how adjectives work.
High quality != higher quality
And it's much better than some other services where instead of 99 cents getting you unlimited access for a month, 99 cents gets you only 100 KB of additional transfer, automatically accruing (i.e. at 10 Mb/s, racking up $742.50 a minute).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
All of this is true, but makes a pretty big caveat to your initial statement. So more precisely, ad revenue alone doesn't work for this decent-sized service.
In other news: TANSTAAFL voted greatest word in English language.
1368127 is prime!
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.
Pandora stores its data about users in flash "cookies" (Local Shared Objects). If you can find and delete those cookies, you can reset your skips (as well as cause Pandora to forget your username and password; doesn't kick you off though). Unlimited skips! I believe you can delete them here,Âwith this Firefox addon and probably by manually finding and deleting them. (I'm too lazy to determine the directory. It would be just wonderful if someone could clarify.) No telling what happens when/if you are caught.
It's a sad state of affairs in the music world when 192 kbs is considered 'higher quality.'
I think that would depend on the quality of the music being played. If people are listening to, say, the black eyed peas, then vinyl-level sound is still low quality.
Not trolling. I've never used it. But why is this used vs. shoutcast servers?
I currently use Pandora about 6-8 hours a day at work, so I will probably be paying the $1 a month :-). I don't knwo if pressing F5 resets my alotment of skips, but it works for allowing me to skip a song I dont want to hear at that moment with little work on my part. The other options you've mentioned, while not too complicated, take longer then pressing F5. As it is mainly for background music, I dont really want to spend any more brain power and tim eon it then it take sme to tab over, press f5, and tab back to my work.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
WOOSH!
Someone missed the point. The fact that 128 kbs is the current standard is fucking sad.
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 tell the difference or cares... Some DJ's are moving to CD's but there are still a large number using vinyl precisely for this reason. Deep, round, rich bass.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
You seem to have missed my point there. By a lot. Sucky music at high bitrate = still sucky.
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
"Some DJ's are moving to CD's"
Funny, sounds like you could have written that 20+ years ago.
Anyway, this is about an internet radio service, let's not restart the analog vs. digital debate here.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
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
I guess that's the way I see it in my head. Probably because I'm former military and used to writing acronyms, even if this isn't one.
Easy to do on the internet. BEP use sub bass for physical impact so a high bit rate is necessary to come close to properly reproducing bass frequencies or the impact is lost. That's why I missed the point. It's actually important to have a high bit rate to hear and feel a BEP track the way it's meant to be heard.
That being said, I'm not that into them, but I am an amateur mix engineer, and listen to their stuff for educational purposes, so it's an easy mistake to make. I mix hip hop (among other things) for local artists.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Let me know when it stops pretending that national borders are meaningfull on the internet.
For streaming? I disagree.
Ah, yeah, I initially wrote down Brittney, but then thought that was getting a bit dated and realized I didn't hate her stuff as much as BEP. Anyway, there was no need for me to be snarky. Sorry.
Pronounced tan-staff-ul?
For every audiophile that listens to music at some super high bitrate, there's 10s or 100s of listeners that don't really care. Personally, 192kbps is where I listen to music because in my early years of listening to digital music that was the best convergence of size/quality to my ears. I understand that that is still pretty compressed, but to my ears it sounds fine. Now my wife even to this day will listen to music at as low as 96kbps (and very occasionally I see a 64kbps) and not be bothered. It makes my ears ring to hear it, but it illustrates the point that many people just don't care as long as they can make out the melody.
Right, but we're talking about streaming. I'll take lower quality over not having the song stutter.
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.
Depends on the format, too, though.
I did some totally subjective comparisons a while back, and found that:
On my computer, with my horrible onboard sound... these formats and bitrates sound the same:
3GPP AAC+ encoded @ 28kbit
ogg vorbis encoded @ 32kbit
lame mp3 encoded @ 72kbit abr
MP3 has great fidelity at high bitrates, but it just wasn't made to scale well to lower bitrates, often employed in streaming.
44kbit AAC(3GPP AAC+ doesn't seem to go beyond that?) sounds very good to my ear. My results are completely subjective, but I'd say it's close to 96kbit lame mp3. Maybe a tad better.
CT AAC+ requires a higher bitrate. To match 3GPP's 44kbit, it seems to need about 64kbit.
FAAC needs about 80kbit. Still better than mp3, but not nearly as impressive as the 3GPP encoder.
I discovered these differences while playing around in MediaCoder. If interested, check it out for yourself, and compare with your own sound card. :)
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!
But surely this is only true if it was recorded and mastered in analog too, which is essentially never done these days. Putting digitally recorded music onto a vinyl is pointless (unless you prefer the noise inevitably picked up).
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!
Why did you capitalize it?
I'd never noticed it before, but the site capitalizes it too, in the top banner:
XKCD updates every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.