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Pandora Limits Free Mobile Streaming Due to Royalty Costs

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March 1, 2013

Rising royalty costs are causing a problem for Pandora, the popular music streaming service that will now have to limit the amount of free music users can access on mobile devices. According to a blog post from Tim Westergren, the company’s founder, users will face a limit of 40 hours per month on mobile devices, a change to take effect this week on the free streaming service. Continue reading Pandora Limits Free Mobile Streaming Due to Royalty Costs

Digital Ad Revenues Smaller Than Expected for Media Firms

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January 3, 2013

Digital may be a less lucrative proposition for traditional media companies than originally anticipated, according to 2012 figures that indicate legacy avenues remain primary ad revenue drivers. For the first nine months of 2012, digital advertising only accounted for about 15 percent of total newspaper ad sales, despite an increase in online readership. Additionally, radio posted digital ad revenues of $561 million for the same period, a mere 4.6 percent of the $12 billion the industry generated in total ad dollars. Continue reading Digital Ad Revenues Smaller Than Expected for Media Firms

Royalties for Satellite Radio Companies to Increase Through 2017

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December 20, 2012

The Copyright Royalty Board has ruled to increase royalties for satellite radio services. Sirius XM Radio currently pays 8 percent of its gross revenue in royalties, but this will increase to 11 percent by 2017, reports The New York Times. The satellite radio companies will pay the royalties to nonprofit SoundExchange, which then distributes the royalties to labels and musicians. Continue reading Royalties for Satellite Radio Companies to Increase Through 2017

Pandora Targets the Vast Majority Who Pay Little or Nothing for Music

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November 11, 2011
  • Speaking at the GigaOM RoadMap conference this week, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad suggested that more than half of Americans do not pay for music each year, while 40 percent only pay about $15 annually.
  • “Conrad revealed that his company aims to monetize the vast majority of listeners who pay little or nothing per year for music,” reports TechCrunch.
  • “While there are opportunities to build businesses on the 10 percent who are willing to pay more, Pandora plans to focus on monetizing the majority via advertisements. Other music companies might be wise to target the non-paying segment as well.”
  • Pandora is working to expand across multiple areas, including “in the home, the television, the living room, the bedroom, even embedded above the ice maker on your refrigerator,” and in your car.
  • Conrad doesn’t feel threatened by Spotify’s success. “I see Spotify as largely complementary to what Pandora does,” he said. “Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek says he thinks Spotify is the future of the record store, and that Pandora is the future of radio.”

Is Skype Co-Founder Gunning for Netflix with Subscription Vdio?

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October 19, 2011
  • Janus Friis, co-founder of KaZaA, Skype, Joost and Rdio (with partner Niklas Zennstrom) is working on a new online video subscription service that will be available soon in the UK.
  • According to GigaOM, Friis has been “assembling an A-team of media and Web technology experts to launch a site that seems destined to replicate the model behind their music subscription site Rdio in the video space.” Offices have been set up in Santa Monica and Europe.
  • From the follow-up Q&A: Vdio (Vee-dee-o) is in closed beta for the UK and is privately funded, while the assembled team’s experience comes from companies such as Netflix, Microsoft, TV Guide and Napster.
  • A spokesperson for Zennstrom’s VC company Atomico confirmed that Zennstrom is not involved in the project.

Are Popular Online Brands Leading to the Rise of Digital Monopolies?

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October 5, 2011
  • France recently banned TV and radio show hosts from naming Facebook, Twitter, or other specific sites unless directly referencing a news story involving the companies. The regulation was created to reduce bias for the popular social networks over other striving, lesser known sites.
  • Apple’s iTunes has benefitted from the phrase “Now available on iTunes” commonly tacked onto advertisements where it was previously customary to simply say “Now available in all good music stores” — which could today be updated to say “online music stores” in order to include other music providers.
  • Additionally, the phrase “Now available on Amazon.com” has become standard for book promotions, which basically provides free advertisement for the site while ignoring other providers.
  • Similarly, “Follow us on Twitter” and “Like us on Facebook” have dominated commerce. “Social networks only work when people use the same ones. In other words, they naturally lend themselves to being monopolized,” suggests The Next Web.
  • Some brand names have now become part of everyday language. Google, for example, has grown so popular that it is commonly used as a verb when describing the act of searching online. TiVo is also regularly used as verb, and sometimes replaces “DVR” in conversation.
  • The article casts doubt on the actual effects regulation would have on social media monopolies: “…users will typically go where all the action is taking place.”
  • “The Internet isn’t a monopoly though. It’s an oligopoly consisting of multiple monopolies from different digital industries, and the reason this is happening really isn’t all that complicated,” adds The Next Web. “Success breeds success, something which underpins most monopolies, whether we’re talking about dominant languages, biological species or, indeed, Internet technology companies. Hegemony stems from success, and it’s certainly not unique to the Internet age.”

Spotlight on Spotify: Facebook Integration, Radio Feature, Impact on Piracy

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September 30, 2011
  • Spotify has been drawing a great deal of media attention this week, more so than the growing number of other streaming music services.
  • Since the company announced its partnership with Facebook at the recent F8 event, Spotify has gained more than one million new users, despite the public outcry from those who question limiting the service’s signup to Facebook users only.
  • In response to concerns regarding Facebook’s media-sharing philosophy, Spotify released a new update that enables users to access the Facebook app without sharing their listening habits, reports Digital Trends. This may be good news for subscribers not happy with the recent announcement regarding Facebook integration — and could potentially serve as a model for how others offer access to services via social networking.
  • In related news from The Hollywood Reporter, Spotify recently released a radio feature in the U.S. that has long been available to European users. Radio will be accessible on the desktop client, but not on the Spotify mobile app. The add-on is reportedly in no way a Pandora killer, due mainly to its lack of mobility and attention to detail.
  • Additionally, Digital Trends reports that Spotify may be having a significant impact on music piracy. Illegal downloads in Sweden have reportedly dropped 25 percent since Spotify launched there in 2009. “Here in the U.S., Spotify isn’t the only option — and it may not even be the best, depending on user preference. Pandora, MOG, Rdio, Grooveshark — the list goes on,” indicates the article. “We don’t yet have numbers to show how these services are affecting music piracy in the U.S. But we’d put our money on them having a similar effect as Spotify is having in Sweden.”

Pandora Embraces HTML5 as Key Enabler for Connected Devices

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September 28, 2011
  • Pandora now claims more than 100 million registered users. CTO and EVP of Product Tom Conrad credits the success of his company’s Internet radio service with the decision to embrace both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating system. Conrad spoke at this week’s GigaOM Mobilize conference.
  • However, Pandora had a rocky start regarding growth on mobile platforms until the iPhone came along to help turn things around. And at one point, Conrad had little interest in Android. Pandora shipped its app through the iTunes store and watched its user base explode from 13 million to what it is today.
  • “Conrad has also since made peace with Android, about which he had previously said that he needed the platform ‘like I need a hole in my head,’ referring to the confusing state of Android fragmentation. On Monday, Conrad didn’t want to go into the specifics of Android vs. iOS market share amongst Pandora users, but he called Android’s growth ‘nothing short of remarkable.'”
  • Now Pandora is embracing HTML5 as it looks to what’s next.
  • “The company launched a new HTML5-powered website last week, and Conrad said that using HTML5 helped to both dramatically increase the performance of the site as well as implement new social features,” reports GigaOM.
  • Conrad calls HTML5 a “key enabler for connected devices,” hoping that it will provide opportunities for Pandora on connected TVs and car dashboards.
  • Currently, 70 percent of Pandora’s listening occurs on mobile devices. “In the future, the majority of Pandora listening will happen in the car and on the connected device,” predicts Conrad.

Will Licensing Deals Help Turntable.fm Compete with Pandora and Spotify?

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September 21, 2011
  • Turntable.fm, a rival music service to Pandora and Spotify, is negotiating with the four major music labels to license content. Turntable.fm is a social media site that allows people to share songs with friends and other online users.
  • The New York-based startup is looking to create a deal that would be unique and allow users to legally stream music internationally, but CEO Billy Chasen has not disclosed the details of the proposal.
  • “Both sides are super eager to get this done, and we’re getting closer,” Chasen said. “We take very seriously the music labels and publishers, and we want to make sure they’re with us.”
  • Turntable.fm, which launched earlier this year and requires users to log in via Facebook, currently has about 600,000 users. The startup recently raised $7 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter, and Maverick Records co-founder Guy Oseary.

iHeartRadio App to Feature Intelligent Playlists: Will it Take on Pandora?

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September 8, 2011
  • An upgraded iHeartRadio will be released by Clear Channel in a few weeks, to be kickstarted by a two-day music festival in Las Vegas.
  • The service is Clear Channel’s answer to Pandora, which now has more than 100 million users.
  • A key feature of the new iHeartRadio app will be playlist creation based on an “intelligence platform” from Echo Nest that will reportedly incorporate 5 billion pieces of information collected from 15,000 music blogs.
  • According to Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese, his company has processed 30 million songs in the past 12 months, while Pandora has categorized 800,000 tracks in the past 10 years.
  • “Echo Nest provides similar technology to MTV, The BBC, MOG and Rhapsody,” reports Radio Ink.

Internet Radio for Vehicles Set To Explode: Pandora Driving Demand

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August 24, 2011
  • The number of vehicles worldwide with Internet radio service is projected to grow from 168,000 in 2010 to 24 million in 2018, according to IHS iSuppli.
  • U.S. sales alone are expected to move from 149,000 to 10.9 million during the same period.
  • “The next several years will see an explosion in the use of in-vehicle apps in cars, driven by booming shipments of automobiles employing head units designed to integrate Cloud-based content,” says IHS. “These apps, whether built into cars or provided via connected mobile devices like smartphones, will provide a range of infotainment, entertainment, remote diagnostics and navigation services. Internet radio is expected to lead the in-vehicle app revolution.”
  • The study concludes that the following are currently driving demand: Pandora, iHeartRadio, Slacker and Spotify (and in the Cloud: Apple’s iCloud, Google Music and Amazon’s Cloud Drive).

BBC iPlayer Expands Internationally with New iPad App

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August 1, 2011
  • The BBC’s popular iPlayer is an on-demand broadband television and radio service that has been available in Great Britain for four years.
  • As of last week, the service is now available through an iPad app to 11 countries in western Europe (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland) — with plans to launch in the U.S., Canada and Australia by the end of the year as a pilot program.
  • The app will allow users to stream programs over 3G and Wi-Fi, with the option to download for later viewing offline. International users will have access to some content for free, while full access will be subscription-based.
  • Luke Bradley-Jones, managing director of BBC.com, describes iPlayer as a VOD service: “We will have content from the last month, but also the best from the catalog stretching back 50 to 60 years.” He added, “What we’re trying to test in the pilot is the ability to drive exploration and discovery through a programming approach rather than an algorithm-based approach. We’re not trying to compete against a Netflix or a Hulu. This has to be tailored and hand-crafted, so we can create a tone of voice.”

Clear Channel Announces iHeartRadio App and Music Festival

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July 12, 2011
  • Clear Channel announced it is staging what is being billed as the biggest live music festival event in radio history.
  • The iHeartRadio Music Festival is slated for September 23-24 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
  • The event will be streamed live on iHeartRadio.com, the new iHeartRadio app, and Clear Channel websites.
  • Hosted by Ryan Seacrest, the current lineup includes Sting, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, John Mayer, Black Eyed Peas, Usher, Bruno Mars, Jennifer Lopez, Nicki Minaj, Jane’s Addiction and more. Additional acts will be added in the coming months.
  • The new app, which will be ready for download in time for the festival, will offer access to 750 Clear Channel stations and customization utilizing technology from the recent acquisition of Thumbplay Music.
  • The iHeartRadio app plans to take on Pandora, “promising access to more songs, content, and more control, plus the ability to create playlists, and no commercials through the end of the year.”

Researchers Create Device that Harvests Energy from Ambient Signals

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July 11, 2011
  • Georgia Tech researchers have developed an energy-harvesting device that can collect power from various sources including radio and television transmitters, cell phone networks and satellite communications systems.
  • “We are using an ultra-wideband antenna that lets us exploit a variety of signals in different frequency ranges, giving us greatly increased power-gathering capability,” explains Manos Tentzeris of Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
  • The device has the ability to capture energy from a range of banks, convert the energy from AC to DC power, and then subsequently store it in capacitors and batteries.
  • The team hopes that the device could provide a new means of powering networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors and communications chips.

UK Consortium Plans to Conduct White Space Radio Trial

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June 29, 2011
  • A consortium in the United Kingdom that includes Microsoft, BT and the BBC will test a white space radio service in Cambridge to determine effectiveness and any possible interference with TV transmission.
  • White space radio has been proposed to complete the UK’s broadband coverage.
  • Data rates range from 10kbps to 16Mbps depending on distance from the base station.
  • UK could be covered with 6,000 base stations on existing cell towers and provide low bandwidth services.

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