shut the box

due to the usual petty money grubbing and total inability by the music industry to understand what the public want, onthe 15th of january anybody outside america had to wave byebye to pandora. although it is not difficult to get around the block (there's a big hint in their faq) this is still a great shame for all those who bought hardware players that stream from the site. i used pandora a lot and it introduced me to artists who would not have made money from me previously.

the reason pandora stopped was the fees asked by the labels for internet radio are far in excess of the charges made for traditional broadcasting and a comparatively small organisation like pandora just can't finance it.

step up last.fm. somehow they are doing the same thing, for free, and without masses of ads (not that you need to look at the screen, or interact with the site in any way. they have the same addins to the social networking and blogging sites pandora has (more even); there is even a plugin for your local machine that will feed that back and create a dynamic preferences list so you only get music you like.... that's the theory anyway. personally i think the pandora interface was slicker and i really hope the bean counters take their heads out of their collective arses and see the light, but until it does come back last.fm is plugging the gap quite nicely.

This entry was posted by gradezero, on 24.1.08. 0 comments