Pandora’s internet radio has always been one of those sites that was really cool in concept, but too inconvenient to ever go mainstream. The service was long tied to computers only, and while it eventually expanded to special internet radios and some mobile phones, it still has yet to become a household name. But with the launch of Pandora’s new iPhone app last Friday, it looks like the service is about to hit critical mass. It’s a free, mobile, digital radio station that only plays music you like and lets you skip the stuff you don’t. And it rocks.
The personalized music service employs a small army of 50 musicians to create a “Music Genome” that describes each song according to 600 attributes. Listeners input a few of their favorite artists, and the site analyzes the Genome to serve up an endless stream of recommended music.
We introduced the app last Friday, when we called it our “flat out favorite application so far”, and since then it hasn’t failed to impress. Streamed music plays flawlessly over Edge and 3G networks - during a 40 mile drive I didn’t once run into any kind of skipping or static. Even better, the app currently has no advertisements playing, though we can probably expect that to change.
Unsurprisingly, Pandora’s usage stats are overwhelmingly positive. Pandora is currently the fourth most popular free app on iTunes (behind Apple’s Remote, AIM, and WeatherBug), and has reportedly been seeing a new listener every 2 seconds. Usage over the weekend hit an all-time high for the service, with 3.3 million tracks streamed to iPhone listeners alone. Perhaps more impressive is the retention rate of listeners, who are averaging over an hour of listening per day.
If there’s one thing that could kill the service, it’s ads. Pandora is going to need to monetize the app somehow - let’s hope it allows us to pay an upfront fee (say, $10) to avoid the annoying interruptions that have made listening to traditional radio a painful experience.
It’s not official quite yet, but the iPhone App Store is live and you can download version 2.0 of the iPhone software - which is all you need to run the 552 applications currently available.
We’ve been gathering videos and overviews of many of the applications and have held them until now. We received demo vidoes for dozens of applications, ranging from basic games to complex GPS-enabled social networking applications. Below are some of our favorites.
Among the apps that we didn’t include below (primarily because of their simplicity) are Recorder (a voice recorder), Movies (movie showtimes), and iMaze (a basic maze game).
Social Networking On The iPhone:
The iPhone, with cult-like users and location aware technology, is the perfect social networking device. Earlier this year we speculated that someone would emerge with a killer social networking app for the iPhone. It turns out that there are lots of contenders.
Loopt
Loopt - We’ve been tracking Loopt’s efforts around their iPhone application for months now. In April we posted early screen shots of the app without saying who had built it. Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference. We’re big fans of Loopt, and will have more news on them later today. For now, download the free application here.
Limbo
Limbo - Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.
On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt. You can download the app here for free.
Personalized radio service Pandora has taken the plunge and released an AIR application into beta that allows users to play music from Pandora without opening the browser.
When I first heard of this development, I thought it was such a cool idea. Music playback is one of those things that really doesn’t need a full browser experience; just give me a simple control panel to enter songs, play and pause, and fast forward.
Unfortunately, the AIR version of Pandora doesn’t do much to actually improve the user experience. See that screenshot above? You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a screenshot of the regular Pandora homepage. It’s actually a screenshot of the AIR application itself.
Why does it look and function pretty much the exact same? Pandora explains that it needs the real estate of a large window to show the advertisements that support its operations.
But the large window pretty much robs the AIR application of all its value. The only additional functionality of any substance is a menu for switching stations that pops up when right clicking on a dock icon. Alas, even this triggers the large window to appear.
If Pandora is going to make this work, it’ll need to find a way around the advertising conundrum. But even if it does, it won’t be the only one. I imagine that lots of web services will have to wrestle with how to provide maximum functionality through AIR without sacrificing too much ad revenue. The problem is only exacerbated with a service like Pandora that’s so simple to operate.
Sonific, an online music playing servuce similar to Pandora and Seeqpod, is to close May 1 as the company was unable to obtain licensed music rights in a way that made the service viable.
1) There are countless startups providing access to any and all music streams without any license whatsoever. However, when we approached the major record label decision makers in order to obtain licenses for some of the music in their catalogs we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them ‘free’ company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions. It seems that the industry’s major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.
2) We therefore had to realize that a company that wants to provide interactive streaming music services must either a) risk the constant complaints of their users, due to the lack of hit content b) proceed to use any and all music (this is routinely done by allowing users to upload their own MP3s) without the required licenses, and therefore be at the total mercy of the record labels at some point in time, and c) build a huge audience very quickly, based on having the content available - permission or not -, and then very quickly sell themselves to a large company that will take care of placating the labels while the money is plenty and the pockets are deep.
MyPlayList, a bootstrapped startup from Agentbleu, a Englishman living in France, combines streamed music and Flickr for a free music service that delivers visual as well as musical abundance.
MyPlayList uses the XSPF xml format to combine the images from the Flickr image sharing service, with music that is hosted across the internet, and similar to Seeqpod does not host or cache any of the music to avoid any copyright issues.
To use, users enter the name of any band or singer, and the system automatically compiles a Flickr - music combination, or suggests an existing playlist if one is already in the system. Registered users can create custom playlists and the site offers various embedable versions as well.
We covered GrooveShark’s new player yesterday, and MyPlayList works in the same space (along with Seeqpod). The visuals delivered by MyPlayList is a nice touch, particularly in full screen mode. Mark the site down as another free music provider that may challenge the likes of the play five times then buy Last.fm and the geo-retarded Pandora.
Update: It appears as though Global Pandora has been shut down since this post went live…deadpooled until further notice.
I haven’t been able to test it myself, since visitors from within the United States are redirected to Pandora itself. But a new site called Global Pandora (recently written up by TechCrunch France) apparently allows you to access Pandora from anywhere in the world.
As we covered last May, Pandora was forced to block international users from its streaming music service because there are no international laws equivalent to Section 114 of the DMCA that allow Pandora to pay rights holders for the usage of their content without signing deals with them first. Listeners in the UK were the latest to have the Pandora plug pulled on them, just after Duncan was compelled to write a how-to guide for accessing Pandora and other blocked sites internationally.
While international users can set up proxy servers or VPN connections to listen to Pandora, many less technical users will find a simple website like Global Pandora much more accessible. If you’re a reader from outside the US, give it a try and let us know how it works for you in the comments.
Pandora is to block users in the United Kingdom from January 15 after failing to obtain a reasonable licensing agreement.
Pandora first started blocking users outside the United States in May 2007 due to licensing issues, but had continued streaming into the UK under the belief that they would be able to obtain an affordable license to continue doing so.
UK Pandora users received an email that included the following:
.As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee….Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008
The stupidity of the RIAA continues to have little bounds, particularly when a decision like this forces a US company to stop streaming outside of the United States, and yet American owned companies based in the United Kingdom (like Last.fm) are free to stream music anywhere. The RIAA is costing the United States jobs and investment by regulations that will force innovative companies like Pandora in the future to only set up overseas, or never set up at all.
Readers in the United Kingdom (or anywhere outside of the US) looking for ways of continuing to listen to Pandora can read this article on how it can be done.
I can remember when OpenHulu launched thinking that the name was nearly false advertising; essentially it provided access to Hulu content away from Hulu, but only to those in the United States. Veoh and MSN have since followed suit and provide Fox and NBC content from Hulu on their sites, but like OpenHulu it still remains IP blocked to those outside of the United States (and possibly Canada).
Web based proxies have been around for a long time, but most don’t work with video, and even those that do don’t provide decent enough bandwidth from which to view content from sites such as Hulu.
One alternative service that has been in use for business for a long time now are Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). VPN’s offer a secure pipe from where you can access the web, and in turn disguise the location of the user on the end connection.
There’s quite a few paid VPN services available, many at reasonable cost ($5-$20/ mth were a few I found on Google) but one service doing the rounds at the moment offers a VPN connection for free.
HotSpot Shield is a plugin for Windows or OS X that offers a free VPN service. There is a catch, it rather annoyingly adds a banner ad to the top of every page you visit, but at the ultimate price point of $0 most people will be able to live with it…well, at least whilst getting access to sites that were currently blocked, and the ads can be switched off on each page, but only after they have appeared.
Does it work? From Western Australia I’m currently listening to Pandora for the first time since May (still a great service.) Earlier this weekend I caught up with a new Simpsons episode, complete with ads from Hulu, then watched archival footage of the Nixon Resignation just for good measure. The only thing it didn’t work on was Joost which told me I should stop using a proxy…no matter, the blocked stuff is mostly on CBS.com anyway, and yes CBS.com works as well.
The speed wasn’t always great, but it was enough to watch video, varying between 600kbps and 1.3mbps on my 2mbps Cable connection.
I hesitated in writing this post because the more people who use services such as HotSpot Shield, the more chances we might end up killing them, or worse still Hulu and others might get smart and find ways of blocking it. Even if we lose HotSpot Shield today I’m betting given the strong demand services like this will have that others will offer VPN services as well, and hopefully free ones at that. At least I hope so, now I have Pandora again I’m really going to struggle if I’m forced to give it up again
Tel Aviv, Israel based MeeMix, which we first covered in August, is kicking-off the New Year by moving their taste-predicting Internet radio service from closed to open Beta.
Internet radio is already a very crowded space dominated by entrenched startups like Last.fm and Pandora. Smaller players and recent entrants such as SpiralFrog, Jango and Slacker are not increasing the breathing room. MeeMix wants its share of the pie, too, and is keeping its crosshairs focused on the U.S. market and its dominant revenue potential.
MeeMix’s public beta launch is marked by the addition of new features:
Meeps: Comment-based conversations users can have regarding a song, album or artist.
Station Home: Every MeeMix station now has a dedicated page allowing users to interact in its context and shape its playlist.
Mee Feeds: This is basically MeeMix’s version of Facebook’s News Feed. The feed indicates songs favorited, stations rated, friends added, etc.
Mee Journey: Users can see other members’ public log or “journey” of actions in MeeMix.
Station Gift: Users can now send other members a station as a gift. The station is then the “property” of the recipient who can customize it without affecting the original station.
Twitter Integration: Users can update their Twitter accounts with songs they’ve listened to, their favorite stations, etc.
MeeMix claims to have doubled its music catalog, but a search for my personal favorites ‘John Coltrane’ and ‘Miles Davis’ came-up empty. The same searches on Jango and Slacker both came-up positive.
I would like to have seen the addition of “genre” to the channel creation wizard which is still limited to artist and song. A widgetized player also would have been a welcome addition, especially the desktop kind.
In my original post, I hypothesized that licensing its engine could become MeeMix’s core business. Looks like this might not be far fetched as the company says they have been approached by a mobile operator for the purpose of powering a taste-based cellular music streaming service. The company has also shared with me some interesting offline deals on the horizon that should keep MeeMix’s potential on a positive note for 2008. We’ll post another update soon. In the meantime, let us know how you think MeeMix compares to the competition.
Update: MeeMix also sent out an email to some users today saying that they will be discontinuing the service in Israel for now due to licensing issues (Thanks Orli):
I have a special place in my heart for music streaming site Pandora. It was one of the first startups profiled on TechCrunch, back in the summer of 2005.
Pandora creates radio stations for users based on input on the songs they like and don’t like. Over time it learns about what you like and tends to play exactly what you are looking for. But it also plays new music that it thinks you will like - I’ve discovered a few new bands from listening to the service. It is usually playing in the background when I blog. In short, I think Pandora is just about perfect in its current form.
I imagine, though, that Pandora has a long term goal of achieving a liquidity event on par with Last.fm’s$280 million sale to CBS earlier this year. And to do that, they seem to think that they need to be a lot more like that service.
Pandora is releasing a batch of new features tonight under the name “Pandora Extras.” They are saying “listening is just the start” (Frankly, I think it’s just enough). The new features are starting to make the service look more and more like Last.fm. They include:
make friends with other Pandora users (it’s a social network!)
recommendations of new artists and songs based on what you are hearing
points you to other Pandora listeners who have similar tastes
100 new “finely tuned genre stations”
Two of the new features are clearly designed to make Pandora more like Last.fm (recommendations based on what others are listening to, and creating a social network). The second bullet above is a way to branch out from a given radio station, and I like it. I’m indifferent to the new pre-made radio stations.
As long as Pandora doesn’t screw up the core listening experience, I’m with them. But if they dilute that experience because they feel they need to follow the current trend of turning everything into a social network, I will be the first to bail on them.
Sonific
MyPlayList
