I hope Pandora realizes how much people love them. It would be such a tragedy if they died. I'm sure they've considered it, but it seems to me that a freemium model would work much better than their current ad-supported service: something like a few free hours of music a day, and unlimited music for $10/month. I for one would be happy to pony up the cash---especially if it meant that Pandora would survive.
I agree. Pandora has literally changed my life. I am a musician as well as a coder, but I have recently fell in love with jazz fusion. Billy Cobham, Chick Corea, Tribel Tech, etc... but I don't have a friend who is really in to jazz that would be my portal into this world. With Pandora I can just type in "Billy Cobham" and have a whole new world of music that I want to hear come right to me. This has increased my practising both in time and quality. I just has opened a ton of doors to me. I would happily support them because their service is that good.
What is sad is that because their service is that good, the radio lobby in America is after it, big time. They hate losing any control they have over the current state of music and Pandora is a "threat" to them. If it's 10, 20 or 50 years, soon wireless will be everywhere and there will be no need for them. They know this and they will fight it. Hopefully we can win this one.
You can already pay for a premium service. It's $36/year, removes all advertisements and increases the "timeout interval" (how frequently you have to interact with it before it pauses) from 1 hour to 5.
I love the service; listen to it everyday at work.
Same here. I don't spend any money on music and I'd gladly pay $10/month for pandora. I'd also tolerate audio advertisements. Not sure why they haven't at least tried increasing the level of advertising.
Audio advertisements perform poorly for general and online services. Audio is, however, excellent for local advertising.. but they'd need to build quite a bit of infrastructure and do a lot of marketing to make that viable.
Does anyone know if they accept donations? I'd be more than happy to pay immediately. I loooove Pandora; I listen to it everyday. I can't think of a website I use more other than Pandora save maybe google/gmail.
I was an early user of Pandora and signed up and enjoyed it too until they dumped a big firewall around the US. They'd be way over 20 million if it weren't for arcane laws preventing the rest of the free world enjoying their awesome service.
I suspect all. If I go to Pandora.com it says this (amongst other stuff):
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
It could very well be the single biggest one. In europe they'd probably need deals for each and every country. (Which require money and time.) The same would go for the rest of the world.
(Also, the farther away from American culture the less precise their classification base would get with regards to the local culture's. Think of Chinese music - which sounds atonal to a lot of westeners.)
It's easy to work around: hire a virtual server (the tiniest one can go for $15/month or so) from a provider in the US, and then stream out to your home.
Such regulations are laughable. The world is one, administrators and monopolists alike should start to give up before it gets embarassing.
I know they have a $36/yr pro account, but I think it should go in increments of hours listened 10 hours free per month .50 per an aditional hour up to 10$ then .20 an hour after that with a cap at $30 month
