Blog
10.12
Free Stuff in Frugal Times—A Look at Pandora
At the office, I frequently listen to Pandora, an online radio station. I’m sure many of you have heard or listen to Pandora. Pandora is not your typical radio station. It’s so much more. Using what is called the Music Genome Project, Pandora lets you choose the artists you like and creates stations that play that particular artist, plus other artists with similar harmonic and melodic sounds. You can even mix it up and add multiple artists to each station.
From Pandora: "Since we started back in 2000, our team of fifty musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more - close to 400 attributes!"
WOW! Pandora is great, mainly because it’s free and it introduces you to new artists. But, as everything, there is a catch. If you don’t like a song, you can skip it, but only a certain number of times. Boo. You frequently get stuck listening to a song you don’t like. Boo #2. And it plays the same songs over and over. Boo #3 If you are a habitual listener, like me, you know what’s coming. And here’s the kicker…with the free version, you can only listen to 40 hours per month, and then after that, you have to pay 99 cents for the remainder of the month. Interesting. Its only 99 cents, right? Why not go ahead and pay it? It’s cheaper than a Diet Coke at Sonic, cheaper than an iTunes song, but of course I’m not going to pay for something I can get for free three days later. And I’m cheap.
This is the genius part about Pandora. Besides getting you hooked with their actual product, they make it a little difficult to stay in the free version. They litter the page with ads (audio and visual) and then limit your listening. Then they send you a cute little letter in your Inbox at the beginning of the next month which makes you even more attached. Genius. Just in case you were too lazy to click on the link, I’ll past an excerpt below.
We're very sorry about limiting your listening last month - I'm writing to let you know that, starting today you can listen to the free version of Pandora again. We hope you'll come back!
Sorry if this limit is driving you nuts - it's the last thing we want to do, but it's the economic reality of streaming. We pay royalties for every song we play, which we feel good about, but it means that for our most consistent listeners, like you, advertising revenues don't cover the costs.
Then it goes into the sales pitch – the yearly service for $36. Not bad. But again, I’m still cheap. In short, Pandora – you are a great sales man (although you haven’t got me yet) and I’m crossing my fingers you don’t cut me off before Oct. 31.
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