The enemy of my enemy, right? Pandora, the Internet darling that lets users stream music for a newly nominal fee, has teamed up with record labels to get Congress to pass a law that would require regular radio stations pay the same music rights fee as that it has to pay. The labels want regular radio to pay up to help offset the losses connected with the industry’s transition from a pre-Internet music business to a decidedly post-Internet music business. (Maybe stop employing untold numbers of lawyers to go after mothers, hmm?)

So it’s pretty simple, actually. When a regular radio station plays the latest Katy Perry single, she and her record label (well, mainly her record label) get zero dollars and zero cents. When that same song is played on Sirius XM or Pandora, or any non-regular radio format, a nice bag of money shows up at the record labels’ headquarters. To that effect.

Regular radio, which isn’t doing too hot either, claims that it should be exempt from such fees because it is the primary conduit of mass popularity. You know, because your average 16-year-old stays glued to his boom box making All Request Lunch requests.

Flickr

This is the first time VUDU says that Disney has allowed a downloadable service to sell their titles. Previously the films were only available on a rental basis. It’s always good news to see large additions to the VUDU catalog, but how about dropping the price a bit on the device itself? $150 is still kind of expensive even if Pandora is now available on the set-top box.

VUDU announced today that Disney is the first major studio to broadly license their HD catalog for purchase to any online service. Until now, HD movies have been available for rental only or offered for purchase in a one off basis.  Disney is licensing 60 of the library films and all new HD releases for purchase day and date with the DVD/BluRay release of the film.  Disney is offering this through VUDU in large part because of the quality of HD that VUDU offers, showing that Disney is a leader among the major studios who are making steady progress toward embracing the digital lifestyle of today’s consumers.

Pandora just put out this video of their pre-production gaming handheld and so far, so good. The final production models will be black and this test model is white, so that they can stress points. The OS on Pandora handheld is Linux and the video shows Quake being played at full resolution of 800×480 at 60FPS. Looks pretty good.

VUDU Introduces Pandora, First Music Application for VUDU

Latest Major Application Built on the VUDU RIA Platform Enables VUDU Owners to Bring Truly Personalized Radio to their Televisions and Home Theaters For Free

Santa Clara, CA, March 16, 2009 – VUDU, a leading provider of digital on-demand entertainment products and services, announced today that VUDU owners can get immediate access to Pandora’s free, personalized Internet radio service on VUDU. Pandora represents VUDU’s first music application for its growing RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform. Pandora joins YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and a selection of more than 120 channels of web based video content available to VUDU owners in their living rooms for free.

“As we continue to expand our RIA platform, we look forward to bringing many more popular services like Pandora to the VUDU Service,” said Edward Lichty, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Content. “Our open development environment allows us to easily release new applications in partnership with some of today’s most popular services and content delivery platforms, increasing the value of the VUDU service platform for our users and partners.”

“Pandora is committed to enabling our listeners to enjoy their Pandora stations in all the places they listen to music; at home, at work or on the go,” said Tim Westergren, Founder of Pandora. “We were impressed with VUDU’s speed and the quality of development and think that VUDU is a great way for our listeners to access their favorite Pandora stations in the comfort of their living room.”

VUDU customers can now experience Pandora on their televisions with all of the functionality that has made Pandora the leader in Internet radio. Using VUDU’s award winning remote control, VUDU customers can create new stations and personalize them by adding new variety to the station and “thumbing” songs up and down as they play. Additionally, Pandora on VUDU supports multiple accounts enabling every member of the family to play his or her own personalized Pandora stations.

Pandora (www.pandora.com) is a free, personalized Internet radio service based on the Music Genome Project, which began in 2000 and is the most thorough analysis of popular music ever undertaken. Each song in the massive collection, which includes Pop, Rock, Jazz, Electronica, Hip Hop, Country, Blues, R&B, Latin and Classical, is analyzed and assessed against up to 400 distinct musical attributes (encompassing melody, harmony, rhythm, etc.) to capture its unique musical identity. Pandora uses this information to build playlists based on musical similarity. By entering a favorite song or artist, a listener is instantly launched into a personalized listening experience. Listeners can create up to 100 of these personal radio stations and refine them by providing thumbs up or thumbs down feedback.

Introduced in late 2008, VUDU’s RIA is a standards-based platform that makes Web-hosted rich applications and services easily accessible through the VUDU Labs area of the VUDU service. Consumers can now use the VUDU remote control to access their favorite Internet content in their living rooms, optimized for display on their HDTVs. Combining the openness and ease of development of Web applications and a lean-back user experience optimized for television, VUDU RIA will be opening to developers later in 2009.

There’s something wrong with CBS Radio’s press release announcing the launch, complete with silly “countdown,” of 92.3 Now FM in New York City, a contemporary hit radio station that will replace K-Rock on Wednesday, March 11, at 5:00pm. (Contemporary hit radio, in plain English, means garbage pop songs, distinguished by their use of auto-tune and use of lowest-common-denominator song-writing.) CBS Radio Senior Vice-President of Something or Other, Don Bouloukos, is quoted in the release as saying, “Our assets in the country’s No. 1 market include among them the best known brands in the business. From the most listened to news and sports stations in the country, to the classic sounds of WCBS FM and the adult contemporary styling of Fresh 102.7, CBS RADIO offers something for everyone in the market – including young adults who are using the radio to discover today’s most popular music as featured on 92.3 NOW FM.” [Emphasis added, obviously.] And that, friends, is why the radio business, as we know it, is truly doomed. No, Mr. Bouloukos, young people are not turning on their radio to discover new music; they’re certainly not sticking around through the commercials to listen to new music on a radio station. No, sir, that’s what the Internet is for, and that’s why your business has no future.

Some background information is needed here. For only one more day, 92.3 FM in New York City will be known as K-Rock, a typical rock station that you can find in any city in the U.S. If you can think of a rock song from the past 20 years, odds are, the station will play it. Twenty times per day. The latest ratings put the station at 21st place, one spot higher than a gospel station—there’s people who listen to gospel music in New York City?—and right behind a Univision-owned Latin Rhythm station. K-Rock, as a whole, isn’t doing too well. In fact, it’s doing so poorly that CBS Radio decided it was necessary to completely flip formats. Out with the Green Day and in with the Beyoncé! Opie and Anthony, a show I’ve enjoyed for several years now, was let go, according to Opie’s Twitter. It, apparently, doesn’t fit in with the station’s new direction. Fair enough, it’s for CBS Radio to decide if the show is relevant to the demographics it’s now targeting.

So CBS Radio in particular, and commercial radio in general, besieged by scary new technologies—your Imeems, Pandoras, iTunes(es?), YouTube, BitTorrents, iPhones, etc.—decides that rock doesn’t cut it anymore, and that a switch to CHR was in order. (There’s already another CHR station in New York, a fact CBS Radio decided to spin by saying that New Yorkers now, for the first time, have a choice of which frequency they wish to hear that Taylor Swift song. (As if people care what station they’re listening to a song on, provided they’re tuning in at all.) The thinking here, one can only assume, is that radio companies feel that station formats like rock, classic rock and whatever else—radio formats with large back catalogues—don’t work in an iPod world. Why pay a DJ to spin Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the millionth time when a good chunk of your potential audience already has the song on their iPhone (or other music-playing cellphone) or iPod (or other portable media player)? Better to program a music station with NEW! HIT! music. That way there’s less of a chance of your audience having the song on their iPod, and there’s less of a chance of your audience saying, “Good God, again they’re playing [this song]! Time to listen to something else!”

We now turn to Mr. Bouloukos’ comment, that young people—most of you guys are young people, I would guess!—are “using the radio to discover today’s most popular music.” First off, that wording is just wrong. If a song is already popular—remember, 92.3 Now will only only play “hit music”—then the odds are that people have already heard it before; in other words, hit music is already popular! A song becomes popular when a lot of people know it, and enjoy it. If a song is popular, then people aren’t, by definition, “discovering” it! (Amateur Hour at CBS Radio, apparently.) Even giving Mr. Bouloukos the benefit of the doubt, that what he meant to say is that people are using radio to discover new music… well, good luck bro. I’d like to find the last 17-year-old in America who is using commercial radio as his primary source of new music. I mean, it’s not like these kids are using THE INTERNET to find new music, right? MySpace Music, music blogs like Hype Machine, sites like Imeem and YouTube, etc. (Then these kids turn around and buy said music either directly from the band’s Web site, or use iTunes or, yes, download it “from BitTorrent.” (BitTorrent is an Internet protocol; you don’t download things “from it.”)

You wanna know how I “discovered” Buraka Som Sistema, this ridiculous electronic group from Portugal? (Yes, I readily admit that my tastes in music are a little on the unusual side, at least by American standards.) On What.cd, a popular BitTorrent site, I was reading the profile of M.I.A., the girl who sings all those songs in Slumdog Millionaire. There’s a little related artists diagram, and one link leads to Buraka Som Sistem. I grab their latest album and say to myself, “holy smokes this is amazing.” (My favorite song of theirs happens to be “Yah! (The Count and Sinden Remix)”.) These guys are coming to New York in May, so barring some sort of catastrophe, I will be there and I will enjoy every last minute of it.

Never mind that commercial radio in New York City will never play Buraka Som Sistem!

Let’s try another example of how people discover new music in the year 2009. Opie, from the aforementioned Opie and Anthony show, had tweeted—there’s this thing called Twitter, CBS Radio, that I’m sure you’ll try to use before the year is out—a picture of a couple of CDs he had in his car. One of them was MGMT, an indie rock band that I had never heard of till then. Before you know it, hey, I’m now a fan of MGMT. What introduced me to this band? Nope, not crusty old commercial radio, but Twitter, a largely rubbish Web 2.0 site that, for all its faults, lets people talk nonsense rather effectively. One Tweet later, I now have another band to see when they swing by New York City.

CBS Radio, that is how people are “discovering” new music in the year 2009. They’re not listening to the radio, sitting through commercials, waiting for the marble-mouthed DJ to say, “Hey, here’s [Cool New Band].” Yes, we know. We heard about [Cool New Band] two weeks ago via Twitter/Facebook/MySpace Music/whatever. Thanks for trying to remain relevant, though!

Now, I still think radio, as a medium, isn’t dead yet. Plenty of people listen to talk radio, whether it’s of the comedy variety à la Opie and Anthony, of the political variety à la Hannity or Rush, or of the sports variety. (My God does sports radio delve into minutia!) Radio is great for news, too: nothing wrong with listening to the headlines while you’re stuck in traffic on the BQE. But this idea that CBS Radio, and others, cling to, that commercial music radio has a future, that people still seek out commercial radio to listen to new music, is laughably outdated.

A recent update to the net-connected Chumby device adds Pandora Radio as an option under the Music menu. Check out the above video for a quick demonstration of everything. It’s pretty straightforward – you’ll need to reboot your Chumby to get it to show up initially but once that’s done, you’ll find the Pandora option amongst the other available music sources.

Then, simply enter your Pandora username and password and you’ll have access to your stations. You can create new stations straight from your Chumby device and they’ll show up on Pandora.com as well.

Full release:

DISCOVER NEW MUSIC FROM PANDORA ON YOUR CHUMBY®

New content keeps music fans engaged with Pandora radio, music videos from Avot Media and news headlines from Rolling Stone

San Diego, CA – October 7, 2008 – Chumby is now giving music fans a new way to stay constantly connected to the music of their favorite artists, while also introducing them to new music they’ll love. All chumby players can now tune into personalized radio stations from Pandora accounts and have Pandora set as the audio source for custom alarm clocks. Additionally, chumby users will now be able to search and view music videos and more from a music video widget powered by tipMotion from Avot Media, Inc., and receive up-to-the-minute music news and images from RollingStone.com, all without logging onto a computer.

“We know music is a big part of people’s lives and fans want to have always-on, always-fresh access to their favorite artists,” said Stephen Tomlin, CEO of chumby. “A benefit of buying a chumby is that the product is always improving as we add new content and features through automatic upgrades. Now chumbys can be used as radios for the Pandora service at no charge, so whether you bought your chumby months ago or today – you win.”

Pandora is an Internet radio service that is now accessible through chumby. When you indicate a song or artist that you enjoy, Pandora responds by playing selections that are musically similar. You can provide feedback on the individual song choices to further refine the playlist to suit your taste. Your chumby can also wake you with your favorite Pandora station and let you listen to “personalized” radio all day.

“Chumby’s innovative connected media player is a natural fit for Pandora,” said Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora. “With Pandora now available on chumby, our listeners have even more ways to hear their favorite artists and discover new music.”

Also available on chumby are music videos powered by Avot Media, a video formatting and streaming solution provider. Now chumby users can watch the most popular music videos each week, and search for thousands of popular music, entertainment, news, and sports videos on the most popular search engines at the touch of a button.

Chumby music fans will also be able to receive the latest news and images of their favorite bands through updates from RollingStone.com. In addition, Wenner Media, Inc., publishers of RollingStone.com, will also showcase content from other Wenner publications such as UsMagazine.com.

The addition of music content from Pandora, music video streaming from Avot Media and music news updates from Wenner Media complements the strong music and podcast offerings already on chumby, including thousands of AOL SHOUTcast stations, music news from MTV and VH1, and dozens of great streaming stations on Radio Free Chumby.

Pocketgamer has an interview with Craig Rothwell, one of the guys in charge of the Pandora project, and it’s an interesting story (if a short interview). The great thing about this project is that it was essentially open source hardware (they got a huge response when they asked for suggestions) but it has a clear design goal so it’s not compromised. I can’t wait to try one out, maybe I’ll play some of those ROM hacks I was talking about the other day.

Oh man, I really wish that was me testing the sucker out. In case you missed it when they first put out renders, the Pandora is a powerhouse open-source handheld in the spirit of the GP32 and GP2X (which I have). It’s got dual analog sticks, an 800×480 screen, full QWERTY, wi-fi, and a bunch of other stuff. It basically looks like the definitive homebrew and emulation device, and it looks to be about the size of a DS. As soon as I know I’m not intruding (I picture it as a very personal operation), I’m going to see if we can get one to test out, although I think I can say with conviction that this thing is going kick ass.

You can get higher-res, downloadable videos here at the forum post.

As with the GP2X, the problem is that the software is not as easy as pie to install (I had trouble with mine) and early adopters will also find themselves out in the cold. If nobody buys, no one will develop. But if no one develops, no one will buy. It’s an ugly cycle usually broken by brand name, but in this case I think the gadget itself is cool enough to warrant a purchase. At ~$330 it’s a bit expensive, but since it basically works as a UMPC too, that’s not bad. Looks like an excellent venue for playing a little Super Metroid (or Final Fantasy 8 – yeah, you heard me). More info here.

Too lazy to read the rest? You really don’t need to (but you should because I made a funny), just try it out. We love Jango and Jango loves us, so click here for private Beta hotness.

Beta Invites For Social Music Site Jango [TechCrunch]

At a Congressional hearing yesterday, SoundExchange announced that it would not enforce the new $500 per stream royalty rates originally scheduled to take effect on Monday, July 16th.

This decision may have been in part due to pressure from listeners. Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, said that “this is a direct result of lobbying pressure, so if anyone thinks their call didn’t matter, it did.”

It also may have something to do with the fact that, if these new royalties were to be enforced, many of the online radio sites would have been forced to shut down completely. Guess how much money SoundExchange can squeeze out of online radio stations if all of them drop off the face of the earth?

Despite yesterday’s decision, this still doesn’t mean that rates aren’t going to go up. SoundExchange and the internet radio companies will need to settle on a new rate structure that’s fair to everyone involved.

For now, though, let’s all take a tip from one of the most prolific artists in the history of modern music, Lionel Ritchie, and “let the music play on, play on, play on…”

Online Radio Is Saved [Wired Blogs]

Users can also opt to include a Loudspeaker 100, bringing the package total to $1,149. Previous bundles will be discontinued. Sonos’ complete new pricing scheme follows the drop.

Sonos also announced today that a 30-day trial of Pandora would be included with all new devices. How much effect this will have on either company is uncertain, but it is, at least, good for users.

* Sonos Bundle 130 – $999.00
* Sonos Bundle 130 w/ Loudspeaker 100 – $1149.00
* Sonos ZonePlayer 80 – $349.00
* Sonos ZonePlayer 100 – $499.00
* Sonos Controller 100 – $399.00
* Sonos Charging Cradle 100 – $39.99
* Sonos Loudspeaker 100 – $179.00

Sonos

Looks like Sansa’s Connect is essentially an OEM product out of Taiwan because Pandora is showing off a rebadged device to showcase its wireless streaming products. No real information on this thing, but TechCrunch got some screenshots and pictures. I wouldn’t expect Pandora to actually launch this device — it’s a proof of concept, kind of like the Music Gremlin eventually became. Pandora is quite popular and I suspect a device with wireless service would be just peachy… but this ain’t it.

Read the rest at TechCrunch…

TC has most of the HOT SCOOPZ, but Pandora for Sprint will stream radio stations to Sprint handsets for $3/month after a 30 day trial. Pandora for Sonos lets you grab the goodies through the Sonos music system, which is definitely a plus for fans of that amazing service/technology.

TechCrunch is also reporting:

Pandora has also redesigned its website to better integrate the listening and community features. The company says they now have 6.9 million registered listeners who have played 4.7 billion songs and voted up or down half a billion times. They play 94% of their entire catalog every day, so they are dipping far into the long tail of music.

Read more at TechCrunch…

Most frightening of all is the prospect of losing Pandora — one of the truly great things to come from the entire Interweb. I had the opportunity to interview Pandora founder Tim Westergren about a year ago, and the way he put it, the service is purely a labor of love born from his affection for expanding his own musical palette.

Right now. Pandora is under siege. In order to survive, it will likely have to evolve. And it will have to go mobile.

If you aren’t familiar with Pandora, you obviously haven’t stepped foot in an American office in the past year, where it has spread from headphone-bound cubicle worker to headphone-bound cubicle worker like crazy. The short of it: The Music Genome Project has mapped out a bounty of songs based on often-obscure musical traits (think “Groove Based Composition” or “East Coast Rap Influences”). You type in a song or artist you like, and the player takes over—creating an ad hoc radio station based on your choice filled with songs that share one or more trait with your beloved tune.

The brilliance in it is in the unexpected. The service not only exposes you to zillions of previously unheard of artists (a lot of the music comes from CDs that were simply mailed to the Project’s door), but it breaths new life into stale commercial music by stripping away layers of pretension. The fact is that many music fans don’t give entire chunks of artists a listening chance. This could be because they aren’t very well known or, as is often the case, because they are TOO well known.

Lets put it this way. I have never knowingly heard a Beyonce song. If you asked me if I liked Beyonce, I’d probably say “Nah,” and assume it was a safe bet that it wouldn’t do much for me. However, with Pandora, I could be rocking out to an obscure shoegaze track when Ms. Knowles suddenly comes on. Not being familiar with any of her songs, unless my Pandora window is filling my monitor at the moment, I’d have no way of knowing who she was. And, surprise, I could find myself actually enjoying it.

This is why Pandora is not just a boon to unknown artists looking for any exposure they can get, but it helps big-time commercial musicians reach entire sects of the music-loving public who have given up entirely on commercial music.

Still, they are threatening to put it under.

So what should Pandora do to survive? The answer is simple: Go mobile.

Sticking cell radios or Wi-Fi on mobile devices is becoming increasingly inexpensive and increasingly common. If there were a mobile way of accessing all of the features of Pandora, it would be far neater than either the walled garden of music content currently offered by cell phone providers, or even the hundreds of satellite radio stations available on portable devices such as XM’s Inno or Sirius’ Stiletto. Imagine being able to input a song or artist on-the-go, and having a personalized playlist, chock-full of surprises, pop up on the spot.

To make this a reality, there are two options: 1) launch a program for high-speed 3G mobile phones that will allow them to tap into Pandora, 2) Launch an MP3 player or dedicated music device with wireless capabilities designed specifically for Pandora.

The first one, while obviously a far easier proposition, does nothing to guarantee the longterm viability of the service. For one thing, it does nothing to address the financial realities of high royalty fees. In fact, it probably would be an awful idea, economically speaking. A large chunk of Pandora’s income comes from banner ads — a dicey proposition for mobile listeners. And while some enterprising mobile users have surely streamed Pandora to their smartphones, this is clearly not in the service’s intent (it actually blocks certain versions of Windows Mobile from picking it up.)

Something along the lines of a Pandora-branded music player would be a far better idea. Such a device would require them to partner up with a deep-pocketed manufacturer, giving them access to financial resources they currently don’t have. If they teamed up with SanDisk or Microsoft to produce a next-gen Sansa or Zune with built-in Pandora access, they could reap huge licensing fees of their own, and have more corporate muscle behind them than they could possibly dream of at the moment.

Pandora should be more than just an Internet radio site — it should be a brand.

Seth Porges writes on future technology and its role in personal electronics for his column, The Futurist. It appears every Thursday and an archive of past columns is available here.

For those of you unfamiliar with Pandora, it’s pretty much the best Internet radio service out there next to iTunes. It helps you find artists similar to those you currently listen to and it does a pretty darn-good job of doing it. But there is bad news for those of you who use Pandora and don’t live in the United States. As of today, you’re now banned from listening to Pandora.

Upset? Don’t blame Pandora. It’s a small company and they only have limited resources for the absurd licensing fees they must pay for each track. Pandora will continue to try to push for its service to be available in other countries, but it doesn’t look like that’ll happen for quite awhile. I feel a bit saddened — wait no I don’t. I live in the US. I’m going to go rock out to some Van Halen.

Pandora to block international listeners from May 3rd [Photos & Ponderings]

Wired recently sat down with Broadband Instruments to talk about its new Slacker music service. In a nutshell, it sounds like a music-lover’s dream. Slacker is comprised of both a service and hardware device. The service will use either WiFi or satellite bandwidth to serve up music channels to owners of the Slacker player. Tons of music, lots to choose from, all that great stuff – think Pandora, except a bit more corporate.

Now here’s the kicker: the service is free. Yup, totally free, but you can only skip six tracks per hour on the service. That means if you keep on shuffling and get stuck with Kenny Rogers, you’ll have to wait it out. There’s also ads on the Slacker player itself, which features USB, touch sensitive scrolling, and a massive 4-inch screen. Expect to shell out $150 to $350 for a player depending on the size of the memory inside it.

So how does a company like Broadband Instruments make money out of all this? Well next month or so, they’ll be rolling out a $7.50 monthly fee which will allow you to skip tracks to your heart’s content and gets rid of banner ads on the player. This service sounds extremely promising and I’m curious as to how they’re going to market this. Either way, keep an eye out for Slacker if music is your thing and you like free service.

Broadband Instruments Slacker Offers Satellite, Wi-Fi Connectivity [Wired]
Is Slacker the Long-speculated iPod-Killer? [Laptop]
New Music Service Slacker Has (very) Broad Ambitions [TechCrunch]