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Posted by: Havohej : Category: ¶ So anyone who has played EVE-O knows that the in-game music can only get you so far. Oh, sure, there’s that rockin’ little track that plays as you enter certain mission deadspaces, but that you can’t get via the Jukebox, that’s not so bad. But if I hear one more series of beeps and blips I might lose my mind and fly my Rifter headlong into an Amarr station’s reactor core at 4200m/sec.
¶ But then I discovered Pandora and the Music Genome Project.
¶ There’s a webradio service called Pandora Radio (www.pandora.com) which is ad-supported so it’s free to the listener. Basically you tell it what kind of music you like, for example I typed in TooL. It searched for a minute and played me a TooL song. Then I told it I liked that song, so it promised to find me more music like that. The next song was a Nirvana song with a somewhat tool-ish riff, but I told it I didn’t like that song so it stopped that song immediately and found me another TooL song. Now, 3 days later, it’s playing Disturbed, Dream Theater, System of a Down, Godsmack, Rammstein, Marilyn Manson, Pantera, Metallica, Megadeth, and dozens more artists I love.
¶ You’re allowed to create as many “radio stations” as you want, each with different likes and dislikes, so I made a second station based off of Eminem, DMX and Jay-Z, as they’re the only rappers I enjoy. By matching the style of music I indicated, Pandora has actually introduced me to some other artists with a similar sound that I’ve been enjoying.
¶ As with anything else, there is some kind of pay-service option, but they don’t press it very much - the first and last time I saw anything about it was when I created my account. I picked the free option and haven’t been bothered about paying anybody anything (though if I had the extra cash, I’d pay to help keep this alive in a heartbeat).
¶ There is, however, one problem about this webradio service and that is that it is not currently allowed to offer its service outside of the United States due to disputes over royalties and licensing. Here’s part of the blog entry from their website regarding them being forced to block the United Kingdom, which was the last territory outside of the US to be blocked:
January 15, 2008
LABELS AND PUBLISHERS FORCE BLOCKING OF PANDORA IN THE UKThis is a blog post I hoped I would never have to write.
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. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the major record labels and some independent record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.
It continues to astound us that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music, and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don’t often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent…
Continue reading “LABELS AND PUBLISHERS FORCE BLOCKING OF PANDORA IN THE UK”
¶ Hopefully in the future they’ll iron out their licensing issues and get this awesome service open to the rest of the world again - I’m loving this even more than VH1classic.com’s limited catalog!
