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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."
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.
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?
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.
Don't hate pandora for this. Hate the record labels. Pandora is just trying to survive, but the RIAA is a bunch of bastards who want to milk everyone for money.
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
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?
Probably because the scope of the agreement with copyright owners doesn't extend to use beyond the US; my understanding from what I've read about it is that it specifies a licensing fee that includes a portion of US revenues in exchange for allowing internet streaming of the music in the US.
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.
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 ($3/month)? It eliminates ads entirely, includes unlimited listening, higher-quality 192 kbps streams, and some other random stuff. Doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.
Not sure about that. I can't listen at work anymore, but I used to have Pandora on all day. You could skip something like 3 songs in a 15 minute period or 6 songs an hour. And with the rating system you could filter out bad music rather easily. And if you ever just got tired of a song there is the "ZZZ" button to remove the song from your play list for 30 days.
Pandora had it's issues. Like I hate listening to live recordings, which I know is one of the tags that they mark songs with. But I couldn't just set that as a preference. Instead I have to give all live performances a thumbs down and hope that their engine is smart enough to realize that I just rated down a band I like because that specific song was live.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Yeah! Like .... radio, and network television, and google... and.
1368127 is prime!
Do none of you use http://www.slacker.com/? I started with Pandora, but I find Slacker far superior. It is free with ads and has a paid subscription with no ads. The channels are more professionally programmed, so I don't get the odd song thrown in that just doesn't fit the chosen genre in the least.
My primary concern with low-cost services, is that of transactional security. I don't want to expose my CC to compromise over only 1$. 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...
I got it too. Here's the email: http://broadcaster.pandora.com/dm?id=A4B6D0714169DA75E4FD0F99442E55C8050542759970026E
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...
Welcome to 2009... Every creditor everywhere offers choices which accomodate online security concerns. For example, one time use numbers for a transaction. There are other options also. Your fear is uninformed.
Overclockers
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
Nope. Usually an obsessive-compulsive F5 finger on the homepage works.
What do you mean ripping off? iTunes charges you $0.99 for a song you then own (without DRM). Pandora charges you $0.99 for a stream you are not allowed to record and can't take with you on your MP3 player. They are two different business models. One is a store, the other one is a radio station.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
If you get that much value out of the service why not just pay the $1/month?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
* 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.
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.
You're an idiot. 192 is 'higher quality' than 128. That's how adjectives work.
High quality != higher quality
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.
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.