July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple’s Pandora-killer cometh — finally?

After being rumored for months (and reportedly suffering from plenty of delays), Apple is making a big push to settle licensing deals for its Internet radio service in time for its Worldwide Developers Conference next week, both the New York Times and CNet are reporting.

Dubbed “iRadio” by Apple press, the service is expected to function much like Pandora or Spotify’s Radio feature. It’ll likely let you personalize music streams based on specific artists, as well as your current music library. There’s also word that Apple has managed to finagle lower licensing rates from music publishers by giving them a cut from other revenue streams (on top of the money publishers get from iTunes sales). Ultimately, iRadio could end up being a great thing for labels (but not so much for existing Internet radio services).

Apple finalized a deal with Warner Music Group today, the first to include both music recording and publishing (which is responsible for songwriting rights), a source tells CNet. The company has also scored recorded music rights from Universal, and it’s still in talks with Sony Music Entertainment and its publishing subsidiary Sony A/TV.

Google launched its own music streaming service, Google Play Music “All Access,” at its developer conference last month. That service offers both unlimited access to Google Play’s music library, in addition to personalized Internet radio. Ultimately though, that lead won’t matter much — Apple has an entrenched audience of music buyers with iTunes, and it wouldn’t take much to convince them to jump on an unlimited music service.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

With some brand-new features from radio-station aggregator TuneIn, traditional radio stations don’t have to be ”dumb” anymore.

TuneIn aggregates over 70,000 live global radio stations (those that are streaming online) and 2 million on-demand audio programs (podcasts, concerts, interviews, etc.) under one web service, and has over 40 million users. And as of today, those users have access to a new universal programming guide, called TuneIn Live, to easily find what’s on the air, view programs/stations that are trending high across the service, and get a greater level of personalization.

So, for example, if you’re annoyed that the local sports news radio station isn’t broadcasting a particular college basketball game, you can head over to TuneIn Live to find one that is. Or if you’re bored with your regular music stations but want to listen to the same genre of music that they play, now there’s a real-time trending feature that suggests alternatives. Also, you’ll get to see album artwork for songs that are currently playing.

The traditional human-curated radio experience is something TuneIn obviously has a lot of faith in, and the new trending features help promote the best of what’s available in a way that wasn’t possible before, TuneIn director of product Kristin George said in an interview with VentureBeat.

“If I’m listening to a country station in Germany, unlike a lot of the DMCA compliant playlist creators, I have no idea what this German DJ is going to play next,” George told me. “That’s a much different experience than you find with digital [aka smart] radio, where Adel is always going to be related to Rihanna,” so they often get grouped together.

In my own experience, online radio service Pandora sometimes seems intent on pairing many of my smart radio stations with Jack Johnson songs and the occasional cringeworthy Nickleback track. So, there’s certainly something to be said for alternative radio stations. If TuneIn can help me find more of those stations and the good DJs those stations employ, I’m all for listening to traditional radio more often.

In addition to the TuneIn Live feature announcement, the company has also added integration with Google+ to alert people when their favorite programs are on.

Founded in 2002, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup has 70 employees and has raised a total of $22 million in funding to date from General Catalyst Partners, Jafco Ventures, Google Ventures, and  Sequoia Capital. TuneIn faces competition from Pandora, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, and others.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Those who have a free Pandora account will no longer be able to listen to more than 40 hours per month via mobile devices, the company announced today.

The company first removed listening caps on its desktop and mobile versions back in 2011 in an effort to stay competitive with rival services like Spotify and attract more users.  Pandora said the reason its bringing those listening limits back is due to the high cost of music royalties, which it’s previously advocated to lower several times in the past.

“Pandora’s per-track royalty rates have increased more than 25% over the last 3 years, including 9% in 2013 alone and are scheduled to increase an additional 16% over the next two years,” wrote Pandora founder Tim Westergren in a blog post. “After a close look at our overall listening, a 40-hour-per-month mobile listening limit allows us to manage these escalating costs with minimal listener disruption.”

The move is basically an indication that Pandora isn’t making enough money through advertising to pay for all that music people are listening to, especially when it comes to mobile usage. That doesn’t bode well for a company that can’t seem to get out of the red, despite record listener usage and revenue growth.

That said, Pandora indicates that the average user listens to about half the total cap (20 hours) each month, and only about 4 percent of users will be affected by this change. Those that are consistently hitting the listening cap do have the option to sign up for Pandora’s premium subscription service, or head over to the desktop version for unlimited streaming.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

While we still have no confirmation of Apple-branded streaming music service, a look underneath the hood of iOS 6.1 may provide some evidence.

Rumors of an Apple Internet radio service first sparked in September and resurfaced again months later after Apple was apparently having a difficult time negotiating how to split revenue with record labels. And last month, Beats Audio CEO Jimmy Iovine added more fuel to the rumor fire after revealing that he previously tried to convince Apple founder Steve Jobs to launch a music service years ago. And now, we have some unexplained files referencing radio in the latest version of Apple’s iOS.

Hidden within the new iOS update for iPad are files that reference a “radio button” that is similar to the button that was previously available on the desktop version of iTunes. The files were discovered by 9to5Mac after jailbreaking the device today.

The radio files also reference a “buy” button, which could indicate a service that users must use or authenticate before the radio functionality is enabled. Also worth noting is that the radio files are only found in the jailbroken version of iOS for iPad but not the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Since we don’t have confirmation from Apple, it’s impossible to know exactly what those files will do. However, it could indicate that an Apple Internet Radio service won’t be an exact carbon copy of Pandora, the largest Internet radio on the market. For instance, Apple may charge users for additional customized channels, play fewer audio ads, and only offer the service to iOS device owners.

Today we know Pandora as the Internet’s radio station that broadcasts over billion hours of music a month. But the company originally started life as a music kiosk service for record stores. And in between, it experienced a savage decade of near-death experiences.

“Pandora actually started as a company called Savage Beast Technologies,” Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy says in a new Total Disruption video. “The vision was to provide software to help people buy more music in music stores. Unfortunately, that was a dying business.”

Source: A Total Disruption

Joe Kennedy, Pandora CEO

Savage Beast struggled for three to four years, Kennedy says, without success, as the music industry transitioned in great pain and with great resistance to digital. Pandora also refocused on digital music, but the pivotal moment was the launch of the iPhone app store.

“We literally dropped everything we were doing,” Kennedy says. “And to this day, Pandora is the second most popular app in the iOS app store.”

The struggle wasn’t over — after four years in the music store business, it took a year to refocus on personalized music, delivered directly to music lovers via the web. The company’s first profitable quarter wasn’t for another five to six years after that — and Pandora had to advocate for laws relaxing music royalties to make it happen, as growing revenue doesn’t really matter if expenses grow faster.

As of today, Pandora has 150 million registered users in the U.S., with a third of them tuning into the service every single day, listening to over a billion hours of music every month.

But Pandora still faces a long road ahead, with possible encroachment into its business model from Apple, still challenging revenue numbers in spite of a growing subscriber count, and possible competition from Spotify.

Here’s the story:

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Yesterday, Pandora CEO Joseph Kennedy asked congressional leaders to pass new legislation — the Internet Radio Fairness Act — that lowers music licensing fees for Internet radio services.

Currently, services that stream music over the Internet pay higher licensing fees than traditional broadcast radio, satellite radio, and cable TV radio stations. That means the old  business models are inherently more profitable by default — something that Kennedy believes is an unfair advantage.

“The current rate-setting structure is a clear case of discrimination against the Internet and innovative services,” Kennedy said during House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, adding that its “fundamentally unfair and indefensible.” (It’s worth noting that this isn’t his first time to speak out about unfair digital music licensing.)

Right now, more than half of Pandora’s annual revenue goes toward music licensing fees.  The company generated a record $$101.3 million in revenue during FY13 second quarter by aggressively growing its advertising operations. And much like traditional radio stations, Pandora is now targeting regional ads and marketing sales. It’s also boosted the number of devices (including automobile dashboards), and experienced a drastic increase in the number of hours its users listen (3.3 billion listener hours last quarter).

Yet, Pandora is still firmly in the red — and has been for the last several quarters.

Others who testified at the hearing said Pandora’s inability to turn a profit is due to missteps in its business strategy.

President of SoundExchange, a non-profit organization that collects digital music royalties for copyright holders, Michael Huppe said Pandora chose to focus on increasing its audience with fewer advertisements and low subscription fees. (Essentially, he’s saying Pandora could have made sure its ad sales kept pace with audience growth.) During the hearing, he argued that artists shouldn’t have to sacrifice what they’re getting paid because Pandora isn’t a profitable company.

Others during the hearing argued that all radio businesses should pay the same music royalty rate as Pandora and other Internet radio companies. This opinion is supported by major music companies, SoundExchange, popular musicians, and other music performance organizations.

SoundExchange and trade group musicFirst even rallied 125 high-earning music performers to sign a letter speaking out against Pandora and the legislation that would lower digital music royalties.

As for lawmakers, the members of the judiciary committee didn’t seem overly swayed by either side’s argument.

What the future holds for Internet radio

If Pandora’s plea to congress fails, then one thing will become abundantly clear about the publicly traded company: it needs a new business model. That said, the company’s options are pretty limited.

It could start gobbling up traditional radio stations that spend less on music royalties, thus diversifying its revenue model. But that means Pandora would become an old school media company, with DJs, syndicated talk-radio programs, local promotional events (e.g.  Concert ticket giveaway at a local gas station that just opened), and maintain physical FM radio station facilities. This option is a giant step backwards, and clearly the opposite of innovative.

Another option Pandora has is to begin making its Internet radio service more palatable to independent artist that own the rights to their songs, as well as unsigned music groups looking for another clear path to profit off of their work. This will be more difficult, because any musician deemed successful on Pandora will be easily swayed to sign with one of the large music companies that can offer more exposure and higher profits.

Pandora can’t launch its own music publishing division, either — or at least not without consequence. If Pandora becomes a competing music company, its library of popular song licenses could quickly disappear, causing Pandora users to seek alternative listening options.

What does seem inevitable, is that lawmakers and regulators will eventually need to come up with a standard royalty rate across all platforms.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Sorry hipsters, the headline above isn’t signaling an underground resurgence of 8-track tapes, the music format that was popular in the ’70s. And if that disappoints you, I have to apologize again because it means you’re a massive toolbag.

However, 8tracks, the streaming music service with a retro-sounding name, did release a slick new version of its iOS app today that promises to enhance your music listening experience.

8tracks is an Internet radio service that lets you create your own custom mixes (aka playlists) based on a specific mood, theme, or subject. You can upload  from your personal collection or pull tracks from cloud-music platform SoundCloud. Mixes, which must be a minimum of 30 minutes in length, can be shared with the 8tracks community and played on a variety of connected devices. And if you don’t feel like building your own playlist, there are over 600,000 pre-existing  mixes created by popular 8tracks user DJs.

As for the new iOS app, 8tracks features a brand-new user interface that’s far more responsive and intuitive than the previous version. You can now use gesture controls to browse through stations and mixes, view full-screen album artwork, and use a new discovery tool based on musical genre and mood. The app is compatible with the new iPhone 5 and currently doesn’t contain any advertising.

After playing with 8tracks iOS app for a few hours, I have to say it provides a nice mix of new and undiscovered music without making me work for it. The mixes and stations I streamed were somewhat similar to indie radio stations minus the unnecessary radio host banter, weather and traffic updates.

Much like rival music services, 8tracks generates revenue through a combination of advertising, ad-free paid subscriptions , and special promotions. Yet, one thing that makes 8tracks stand apart from competitors — not just in features or method of music discovery — is its success in making the service profitable. 8tracks CEO David Porter told me that the startup made a “modest profit” during the last quarter.

8tracks has an average of 5 million active users per month that listen to more than 10 million hours of music collectively.

Founded in 2006, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has previously raised a total of $1.4 million in funding to date from Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, SoftTech, SPA, English DJ Pete Tong, and 7digital founder Ben Drury. It faces competition from Pandora, Songify, Fuzz, and many others.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

In late 1958, John C. Koss created the first portable music system, the Koss 390 phonograph player.

Bulky and heavy by today’s standards, it was compact for a time in which stereo systems were more like furniture. But when Koss showed the player at an audio exposition, audiophiles virtually ignored it, gravitating instead to the true innovation: the world’s first-ever stereo headphones Koss paired with it for demonstration purposes.

Fast forward 60 years.

In 2010, the Koss company found an old battered 390, literally at a garage sale. The company bought it and restored it. Then earlier this year, John’s son Michael, now chief executive of Koss, connected his father’s first invention to one of his own: the first Wi-Fi-powered internet-addressable headphones available on the market.

He then put a record — one of this father’s favorites, Sinatra’s Fly Me to The Moon — on the turntable, and listened to it in the highest possible MP3 quality, wirelessly. The first true over-the air internet headphones were born.

Fly me to the moon

John Koss started the Koss Corporation with a $200 wedding gift that he diverted — with his wife’s permission — to buy 20 broken-down TV sets to refurbish and rent.

But it was only in 1958, when he paired the first stereo headphones with his “portable” music system, that he introduced the world to personal music … sparking a revolution that lives on in the ghetto blaster of the 80s, the Walkman of the 90s, and the iPod of the 2000s.

“Now, we want to deliver that same experience via the web, wirelessly, directly addressable to any individual wearing this device,” says Michael Koss.

Personal music, without wires

The new product is Striva Pro. Koss sent me a pair of the $450 over-the-ear headphones to test — and they’ll be hard to let go after this review is written.

The goal was simple: freedom from wires. All wires.

“We’d been doing a ton of research on headphones, and the one thing that came out was a consistent complaint about wires,” Koss said. “While we’ve had wireless solutions since the 70s … infrared … radio … BlueTooth … we wanted to make something that works over Wi-Fi.”

Wi-Fi has become so ubiquitous that the company would be able to ride existing wireless infrastructure practically everywhere. That realization gave Koss an idea.

“When we did that, we realized we could run it in an infrastructure mode, and anywhere those headphones could connect to the internet … they could receive the same data from our transmitter.”

That’s the key innovation behind the Striva Pro.

It means that I can put on the Koss Strivas in my home, connect to my home Wi-Fi, and enjoy any stream of music available on the internet, wire-free. And I can take the Strivas to Starbucks, my office, the gym, or any other location on planet earth with open Wi-Fi and do exactly the same.

The Strivas have a battery, Wi-Fi chip the size of pencil eraser, and a tiny microprocessor all onboard. Everything is self-contained, wireless, and simple.

Rock it old-school and new-school

Or, of course, you can also just attach the Strivas to my iPhone and play music right from there, just like ordinary headphones.

But what if you want to be wireless even when Wi-Fi is not available? Koss has you covered with the ability to stream wirelessly to the Strivas from non-internet sources.

Source: Koss

The CAP, or content access point. About the size of a book of matches.

Along with the Striva headphones, Koss includes a content access point, or CAP. Tiny, the size of a book of matches, the CAP  plugs into any headphone jack. Attach your CAP to your iPhone with the included cable, and you’ve just set up a Wi-Fi transmitter. You could conceivably leave your MP3 player in your gym bag, and go work out wirelessly without the need for a publicly available Wi-Fi access point.

“Our chief financial officer puts his phone in his locker and listens to the music in the gym … up to 300 feet away,” says Koss. “We’ve had it up to 500 feet.”

Or you can simply plug the CAP into your computer and stream wirelessly from iTunes, Windows Media Player, or any other app playing sound on your PC.

Frankly, it’s a game-changer: music from the cloud — or your hard drive — straight to your headphones. It’s all of your music plus the infinite variety of the internet, all available without cables.

How does it work?

Koss didn’t spare much with the Striva. In the box you get no fewer than nine components: the headphones themselves, one charger for both the headphones and the CAP, the CAP itself, and a variety of wires of varying sizes for every possible need. Plus, you get a very nice case.

Source: Koss

Selecting the streams and channels you like …

Once out of the box, you pull out the headphones, plug the CAP into your phone, and go to MyKoss.com.

There you walk through a process of syncing the headphones to the CAP and setting up your music preferences, which involves choosing various channels and streams from internet-based radio stations. Channels are groups of similar stations; streams are individual stations.

None of the music originates with Koss: MyKoss.com simply is the handshake that connects your ears with the internet radio stations you’ve selected.

Once you’ve set up your preferences and synced your CAP and headphones, music from whatever channels you’ve selected will flow automatically to your Strivas. It’s not difficult, but it’s not as easy as it could be either (don’t expect granny to do it herself).

Using the Strivas takes a little bit of instruction, something you might not have had to undergo for any other pair of headphones before, due to Koss’ Apple-ification of the user interface: as few buttons as possible. In fact, there are just two controls: a joystick-like uni-button (my term) on your left ear, and a volume control strip.

Source: John Koetsier

Everything but the kitchen sink …

Turn the Striva on by pressing the joystick — a short press to go into Wi-Fi mode, a long press to look for a broadcasting CAP. Swipe it back for the next stream, forward for the previous stream, push up to “approve a song” … or hold back for the next channel, hold forward for the previous channel … you get the picture.

After a while it’s second nature, but you will be checking the (very good) visual manual more than once.

Volume is a bit of a tricky beast: A long control strip curving up the side of the left headphone. It senses your finger and adjusts the volume up or down as you swipe.

Well, that’s the theory.

In practice, volume control is a little hit and miss, and you’ll find yourself adjusting up and down multiple times to get exactly what you want. I tried different methods: full finger, fingernail, fingertip. Ultimately, a full finger press moving at medium speed seemed to work best. There’s a definite cool factor, and fewer moving parts mean great reliability, but the control strip is exactly optimal right now.

What about the sound?

And audio quality? I asked Michael Koss about that.

“Like everything else, it’s garbage in, garbage out. We’re dealing right now in a society that’s very used to compressed sound … it boggles my mind that I can walk through an airport see teens sharing ear buds, but people have gotten used to that level.”

In practice, I found the headphones to offer excellent sound — depending, as Koss said, on the audio source. Where available, the entire Striva system scales to the quality of 320 kbps MP3 files. That’s better quality than typical music downloaded from iTunes, which is 256 kbps AAC (a different audio codec from MP3).

“We’re quite comfortable with the product we’re releasing. It’s getting the best throughput you can with that technology,” Koss says. “But if the source material is lousy  … we can’t do anything about that.”

Would I buy them?

$450 is not a cheap pair of headphones. And the earbud versions, which are coming in a few months, are $500 … the cost of extreme miniaturization.

There’s also room to improve. The volume control can be made more reliable, and MyKoss could be made into a platform that, perhaps, tweets songs that you say you like.

But having all the music on the internet in your head is compelling. And the music you love, wherever you go, without wires … I’ve fallen in love.

Perhaps it’s sort of like the Retina Display iPad or MacBook Pro. Once you’ve used it, you can’t go back (but if you’ve never experienced them, it’s hard to tell what you’re missing). Having experienced my music wirelessly anywhere I wanted it, it’ll be hard to go back to cords.

And Koss hasn’t skimped on any components with the Striva: all the connectors and wires you need are right in the box.

So would I buy them? I’d have to say yes.

As Michael Koss says, “It’s an IP addressable end point that you stick in your ear.” Welcome to the future.

photo credit: S. Randall Saffen via photo pin cc, flyzipper via photo pin cc

ABC News Radio, the largest commercial radio news organization in the US,  is curating the content for Slacker. Listeners have access to a wide range of stories from expert sources. There are two primary channels, Men’s Life and Women’s Life, each featuring 12 categories. Many of the categories overlap, like Health & Fitness, Food & Drink, and Travel & Adventure, although the stories will differ for men and women. Other categories are gender specific, like Cars & Gear for men and Hair & Beauty for women.

“Since men and women often have different interests, our new Men’s Life and Women’s Life channels appeal to different sensibilities and styles,” said Steve Jones, vice president and general manager, ABC News Radio. “We curate this content to make it unique, but ultimately Slacker listeners drive their own experience, since they can skip stories within each channel just as they do now with songs.”

Examples of stories for men include “Night Vision”, a story told by an editor at Car and Driver magazine about his experience driving 48 miles to work in the morning without ever looking out of his car window. There is also a guide to complimenting a woman, as told by employees at Esquire magazine. On the female side, ladies can listen to US Weekly Fashion Director Sasha Charnin Morrison spill secrets of a celebrity stylist, or author Pauline Frommer (of Frommer’s Guidebooks) provide tips for solo women travelers.

Slacker has worked with ABC Radio since 2010, when they began promoting non-music content. It has also worked with ESPN Radio, American Public Media, and multiple comedy stations. The stories on the Lifestyle stations will be unique to Slacker, which differentiates it from other services like Stitcher that also offer customizable talk radio. As opposed to Pandora, which uses its genome to generate suggestions, Slacker’s stations are hosted and curated by artists, bands, DJs and experts. It has around 6 million active monthly listeners and 40 million registered users.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Streaming music startup Spotify has added a Pandora-like radio service to its iOS applications, finally giving free Spotify users in the U.S. a reason to download the Spotify app for their iPhones and iPads.

Spotify has offered its own radio service inside the Spotify desktop application since mid-May. If you used Spotify and Pandora, it would most likely make you want to drop Pandora to make your music-listening-life simpler.

Now Spotify is bringing that radio app to the iPhone and iPad, and both free and premium Spotify users can take part. Previously, free Spotify users had virtually no reason to use the mobile app because only premium users who pay $10 a month get access to streaming music on iOS devices. Now, free users can download the Spotify iOS app and get some functionality out of it. Premium users will get radio access in iOS too, and because they pay, they have no advertising and unlimited skips.

“Our focus has always been on creating an amazing user experience,” Spotify product VP Charlie Hellman, said in a statement. “The radio feature we’ve added to our iPhone and iPad apps gives users the ability to discover, listen, and save what they like on the go — all within one app — for free.”

The updated Spotify iOS app is now available for download in the App Store. The company will add radio functionality to its Android app in the near future as well.

Check out the gallery below for more looks at the awesome radio addition:

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Pandora now has more than 37 million active users, Westergren said in an interview with Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

“We are large enough as a company with our reach to be attractive to a huge pallet of advertisers,” Westergren said. “Now we are large enough in smaller markets to attract the interest of local advertisers. That is traditionally the large source of revenue for broadcast radio.”

Pandora enables personalized radio, where you can select a channel for music from a catalog of 900,000 songs. That channel plays for you, interrupted occasionally by ads, unless you are a paying subscriber. About 95 percent of the 900,000 songs get played in a given month, Westergren said. That offers far more choice than a typical broadcast radio station.

Beyond expanding into local markets, Pandora is also expanding from the desktop computer to cars, living rooms and handheld devices. One of the biggest tectonic shifts going on, Westergren said, is the change from broadcast to personalized radio, he said. One fact working in Pandora’s favor is that it pays artists a licensing fee for every song that it plys, in contrast to broadcast radio, which doesn’t.

Pandora has been around for 11 years, but it really took off after users began listening to it on the iPhone starting a couple of years ago. Now, in certain cities, the Pandora audience is larger than the broadcast radio audience, Westergren said. Pandora is also hiring local salespeople to generate local ads now. Pandora does know the zip codes of its users, so it can run ads on a localized basis.

[Update: The Katz Radio Group points out to us that broadcast radio reaches about 242 million people weekly, whichi s far above the number of Pandora users. About 93 percent of people over the age of 12 listen to radio weekly. So it's probably doubtful that Pandora has a larger audience than radio in a large number of markets.]

For the most part, Pandora competes with broadcast radio, which historically has commanded 80 percent of the 16 hours of listening time for music each week. Only about 20 percent of listening time is dedicated to music that people buy, such as CDs or subscription services or fee-based music such as iTunes.

Advertisers aren’t all that easy to deal with when you’re small. They may pay you $1 to reach a user one time, but they won’t pay $2 to reach the same user twice, Westergren said. Users can pay subscription fees to Pandora, to get rid of the ads and have higher-fidelity audio. Pandora has also branched out into comedy radio, and that is going well, Westergren said. But showing videos to users isn’t necessarily going to happen, he said, as an extended service. At some point in the future, talk radio or sports news might be added, since that commands about 15 percent of the radio audience.

[photo credit: Chikodi Chima]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Just ahead of the launch of Facebook’s much anticipated music service, Internet radio service Pandora has unveiled a slick new HTML5 website and removed the cap on how much music free users can stream each month.

“In late 2010 we started with a clean sheet of paper, challenging ourselves to create a new Internet radio experience that was fast, social and easy while still being familiar to the tens of millions of people that listen to Pandora each month,” Pandora CTO Tom Conrad wrote in a blog post. “The result is ‘New Pandora’.”

Streaming music services have been making quite a few headlines as of late with the hyped U.S. launch of Spotify, the aforementioned Facebook service and MOG and Rdio offering free versions of their services. With such a crowded field, Pandora has decided to reinvent its site and the way users experience music in hopes of keeping people coming back.

The new HTML5 version of Pandora looks much cleaner and more modern than its old implementation. Look at the above photo and you can see the easy-to-access play controls on top and colorful high-res album art in the center. One click on the left-hand column changes your artist, song or genre-created radio station. Another helpful feature shows lyrics below the song information.

There are also new social features included in the redesign that help with music discovery. You now have enhanced profiles and access to a music feed that lets you see what your friends and like-minded members are listening to. Stations will also now have their own URLs, which make them easier to share on social networks.

Along with the redesign, Pandora has thankfully removed the 40-hour streaming cap that used to plague all non-paid users. Still, to get the most out of the service, users have to pay for a premium Pandora One account. A premium account costs $36 a year, removes advertising and lets users listen to higher-quality audio.

What do you think of the new Pandora layout and site changes?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Michael Robertson, who already participated in one reinvention of the music business by founding MP3.com, is launching a new way to listen to talk radio and music.

His startup is called DAR.fm (DAR stands for “digital audio recorder”) and he demonstrated on-stage at the Launch conference in San Francisco today. Robertson compared the new service to what DVR does for television. Just as DVR lets you record many TV shows at any time, he said DAR.fm will allow you to record the radio shows that you care about.

The service browses radio stations that already broadcast their content online and lets you search that content by station or by show. Then you just select the shows that you want to hear, hit “record”, and at the appointed time DAR.fm makes the recording for you. DAR.fm allows you to listen to the recording when you want, either in your Web browser or on applications for iPhone, Android, and other phones.

It isn’t just a single, undigested recording either — Robertson showed that if you recorded a music station, DAR.fm would allow you to navigate between each song. In other words, it’s Internet radio with control that you won’t find in an application like Pandora. (Pandora, by the way, may be adding talk radio features in the future.)

But aren’t there legal issues with these recordings? Robertson said there’s legal precedent in the cable industry, with court cases protecting the right to make these recordings as long as viewers hit the record button, even if it’s a virtual record button hosted on a company’s servers.

Still, Robertson did close his presentation with a little speech about how the music industry hasn’t changed. Or at least the legal departments haven’t — they still want to sue everyone. (MP3.com was one of the first companies sued by the record industry.) Robertson said he’s hopeful that there will finally be some changes as CD sales “crater”.

“I swore to myself I’m not going to do another digital music thing, and here I am,” he said, turning to conference organizer Jason Calacanis and adding, “Thanks, Jason.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It looks like online radio station Pandora, which just filed for its initial public offering, has some ambitious plans for the future.

In the company’s IPO filing, it lists a number of strategies for building “a successful long-term business.” Many of these items are either vague or obvious, like “enhance our service” and “build our ad sales force.” But the section closes with the most interesting point:

Expand Content Formats. Although music format stations represent 80% of total radio share according to Arbitron, a media and marketing research firm, many radio listeners are drawn to sports, talk, news and other forms of content beyond music. We think there is an opportunity over the long term to offer these types of content in addition to music.

Later in the filing, when discussing the competition, Pandora notes that this non-musical content gives “terrestrial” radio stations an edge over its service.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Pandora will be announcing a slate of talk shows tomorrow, or that it’s actively developing a service in this vein — those other formats might just be on the roadmap for the future. It’s also not clear how this would fit in with Pandora’s existing technology, which revolves around creating personalized music stations made up of songs that you’ll probably like. Could Pandora develop a way to provide similarly sophisticated recommendations for non-musical content?

Pandora’s others plans include expansion beyond the United States, and into new car technology systems, new phones, and other devices, according to the filing.

Grooveshark, whose website promises “free Internet radio stations,” could be seen as competing with Apple’s iTunes Music Store, which depends on the cooperation of major music label groups like Universal.

The app was originally submitted a year ago, but repeatedly rejected for what the company claims were “primarily selfish reasons” on Apple’s part. After spending a year tweaking the app to get it through Apple’s stringent approval process, it was accepted on August 8 to much fanfare by users of the service.

Grooveshark said the app was taken down in response to a complaint Apple received from Universal Music Group UK, which has been known to be in a contract with rival Internet-radio service Spotify.

Unlike competing services like Spotify, Rhapsody, and Rdio, Grooveshark’s service works by relying completely on users to upload and manage a catalog of songs. In an attempt to avoid legal troubles, the company has actively looked for licensing agreements with record labels in the past and polices its catalog by obeying takedown requests. Its only major licensing agreement to date, however, has been with EMI.

On its blog, Grooveshark states that it is committed to getting the iPhone app back in the store and into hands of its iPhone users. Versions for other platforms, like Google’s Android and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, remain available.