Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays, Not $16.89

Here’s another rebuttal for David Lowery, who recently asserted that Pandora was ripping him off. It turns out his record company is ripping him off, which should be old news to him by now.

Lowery told kids to get off his lawn about this time last year, blaming Creative Commons.

David Lowery’s “My Song Got Played On Pandora 1 Million Times and All I Got Was $16.89” article has been picked up over and over and over, including by very respectable folks, often without comment.

This has left many readers with two impressions:

Pandora only paid $16.89 for 1 million plays.1

Pandora pays much lower royalty rates than Sirius XM and especially terrestrial AM/FM radio.

Music royalties are complex, but both of these are patently untrue.

via the understatement: Pandora Paid Over $1,300 for 1 Million Plays, Not $16.89.

Pandora-ed out?

I was impressed to learn that the Roku’s Pandora channel had been redesigned, allowing one to link it to an existing Pandora account. Now I can get all of my Pandora channels on the Roku, making the Pandora channel much more useful to me. A few nights ago when Travis and I were alone, I cranked up my Intoxica surf-rock channel and we rocked out to that while I was cooking dinner.

Having enjoyed the tuneage from my Roku, yesterday I fired up my Intoxica channel on my laptop. You know what? It didn’t last longer than an hour. I became bored with the music and turned it off.

I think this is one of the flaws with Pandora: you can build a channel so exactly that the music begins to sound the same. It doesn’t take long for me to start wishing for a little more variety. With Pandora, one can box oneself into a corner.

There are some new music services out there now like Spotify, which might fit the bill, but I’m not in the mood right now to have to learn another service all over again (and there’s no free Linux client as of yet). For now I’ll stick with Mondomix and it’s world music stream.

I’ve made it to the end of the Pandora rainbow

Pandora-end-of-rainbow
I finally got to the end of the Pandora rainbow yesterday after delightfully chewing up my 40 free hours per month. There wasn’t a pot of gold there but instead a polite request for $0.99 to keep listening for the rest of the month (i.e., today). After entering a few credit-card details I was on my way and the music kept playing.

Pandora-end-of-rainbow-thanks

Thus I’ve spent my first $0.99 on Pandora. More to come, I’m sure!

Pandora schwag

When my buddy Ben blogged about how awesome Pandora is, I decided they needed to know about it. They’re sending me some schwag in return! In a week I should have a sweet Pandora T-shirt to show off.

I can’t count how many bands I’ve discovered thanks to Pandora, and many of my friends have, too. That’s a company I don’t mind advertising about!

(And just so you know they’re hooking Ben up, too.)

Pandoramonium

I fired up Pandora for this first time outside of work. Set up my laptop in my living room and rocked out while I cleaned up after breakfast. Addiction experts would now say that I have a “problem.”

I’ve also noticed something. I’ve set up about 10 “channels” that were launched by specifying the bands I like. Since tuning in, I am far more likely to skip over my so-called favorite bands in favor of the great new stuff Pandora brings me. I never expected that to happen. Maybe I should write Pandora and ask “is this normal?”

Pandora threatens my wallet

Have I mentioned how much I like Pandora? I’ll be working away and listening to my R.E.M. Channel (and Cake Channel, and many others) when some amazing song will begin playing and I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to see whose song it is so I can go out and buy it. So far, Pandora’s turned me on to Muse, The Killers, Kings of Leon, We Are Scientists, The Shins, Jude, Miracle Legion, Sam Prekop, The Redwalls, Pete Yorn, Bishop Allen, Broadcast Debut, Keane, The La’s, Pernice Brothers, and Kashmir, to name a few. Out of those I like The La’s, Pernice Brothers, Keane, and Kashmir the best, I think.

In short, I am hopelessly, irresistibly hooked on Pandora. Its introduced me to more music in two weeks than the month I’ve had Sirius radio, or the years I’ve listened to WKNC, or anything else I can think of, for that matter. I feel compelled to buy music again – something that I more or less swore off a while ago as a waste of my money. I actually feel hip again, believe it or not.

Pandora’s gotten me excited about music again. I’m loving it, baby!

Pandora

Santa brought me a Sirius satellite radio kit for my car. While I’m enjoying the tunes, I’m finding that I already own most of them. Also, working from home the way I do, I am not in the car all that much to enjoy my music.
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Mondomix’s MP3 service calls it quits

Mondomix


I was crestfallen to tune into my favorite world music streaming service only to be greeted with this message:

Après des années d’intense travail, Mondomix doit abandonner son activité de vente de musique en téléchargement. Nous vous proposons à la place de découvrir nos vidéos, notre webradio et nos articles sur www.mondomix.com.

After years of intense work, Mondomix has to give up its legal music download activity. Instead, come and discover our videos, webradio and articles on www.mondomix.com.

Zut alors! I’ve purchased a lot of music through Mondomix’s service and loved discovering artists I would have never otherwise found through domestic services. It makes me even more determined to pick up the pieces and spread the word about the amazing music being made in the world.

The First Amendment is not just for artists

So this young NPR intern named Emily White wrote a breathtakingly clueless defense of her choice to steal music rather than to pay for it, her ridiculous argument boiling down to it being more “convenient” to steal than to purchase. She apparently doesn’t see how her actions hurt the very artists she claims to admire.

Over at the Trichordist blog, musician David Lowery wrote a rebuttal to White. Lowery is the force behind the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven. I’m a big fan. I own a number of Cracker CDs and even got Lowery’s autograph after Cracker swung by Raleigh for a show a few years ago. Some of my money wound up in Lowery’s pocket and I’m happy with that. He earned it.
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Giving Turntable a spin

Friday gave me my first look at a new music service called Turntable. It’s a service where you and up to five of your friends can take turns DJ-ing a music channel (or “room”). Participants in the room can vote whether a song is “lame” or “awesome” and the vote determines whether the song stays in rotation. They can also share real-time comments in a chat window.

It’s an intriguing idea, but how does it work in practice? It works well if you like hiring schizophrenics to DJ your parties! There were some cool tunes I heard that I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to, but the music flow soon became a jumbled mess.
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