It is a very big day for Pandora as they are launching the new version of their site.
Some of our new features include:
Simplified Station Creation – Enhanced auto-complete choices and personalized suggestions make creating new stations and discovering new music or comedy more intuitive and personal.
Discovery of Music with Friends – Enhanced listener profiles and a new music feed offer a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora. The music feed will roll out slowly over the course of the coming days. In addition to the prominent new “share” button, stations now have their own URLs, making it super easy for listeners to share favorite stations via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
Improved Control – Prominent and ubiquitous access to familiar player control buttons including Play, Pause, Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down icons helps listeners to easily personalize their music and comedy stations. A new shuffle feature also allows listeners to shuffle any collection of stations to add variety to their listening experience.
Enhanced Artist Information – An option to learn more about the music, find lyrics, read artists’ biographies and expand the album art size.
Unlimited listening – We’ve removed the 40 hours listening cap – you can now listen as much as you want for free.
In the battle for music player supremacy, many online music players have burst onto the scene. Now recently I’ve personally been a fan of Pandora and still support them, but other entries like imeem, and Last.fm just couldn’t grab my attention. Recently a music player that I had previously tossed into the pile of the above mentioned, uninteresting players, Slacker radio.
Slacker radio offers up an interesting hybrid of both online streaming music from pre-existing stations, the ability to create your own playlists, and functions as a shop for products that allow you to take Slacker radio with you everywhere you go. Both a web app and a mobile app, Slacker does a great job with providing an easy to navigate user interface and a decent list of stations ready to play as soon as you create an account. The stations are divided into categories offering up something for everyone, if not just a taste of the power of this application.
It’s not uncommon for us here at Crenk to come across web applications that do the same thing, the only differences are that some might do it better or worse than another. In this case, the team has come across a very interesting music listening application called TubeRadio.
Once again for the music lover in all of us, this just astounds me. Now it does not have the capability to tap into your own stored music, but as powerful as this search engine is, this could very well replace my Pandora or Last.Fm efforts, even if only for a little while. TubeRadio calls itself the Youtube for music. After you see the video below, you’ll know what I mean.
So what do you think? They search is amazing and very thorough. I’m surprised at how music it can find, and even more so by how seamless the integration of listening and/or watching your music can be. During the video the speaker mentions it being like your personal MTV. Yeah, MTV, from when it used to actually play music.
My experience with TubeRadio has been a good one. I’ve found what I want to listen to, it streams everything smoothly with little problem. In my opinion the only thing really missing is the ability to tap into my own music, but I can overlook that for now since I’m lining up some great music of my own, and of other recommended playlists.
Internet radio has taken off in the last few years. This is because more and more people are using smart-phones and using laptops on the go. Not to mention the fact that you can listen to your favourite radio station whilst holidaying in Australia or backpacking through Europe. Then, along came Internet based radio. This meant that there was no traditional radio station (ie. On a radio) for a particular company – it solely exists on the internet.
Pandora became one of the biggest streaming high quality music and advertisements across the web. Now, they have secured a massive investment from Greylock Partners of around $35 million dollars!
Currently, Pandora plays advertisements in order to make ends meet. Now, after securing this investment there is talk of charging listeners who tune in for over 40 hours every month 99c or an annual premium of $39 for unlimited listening and elimination of all the advertisements.
“New funds will be used toward the continued growth and development of Pandora” said Pandora.
It’s a good move to. Now that people are ditching podcasts more and more in search of radio – investing now would be wise. And when media players and internet speeds improve – internet TV would be no shock appearance.
Yahoo‘s woes have been smeared across every form of tradtional media as well as every news site on the net. Starting with their slump in stock value, their lack of management, their massive cuts due to the economy, and their on again/off again courtship with prospective buyers. Yahoo has gone through its fair share of hard times, much like any other company has been through this strained economy.
The services that Yahoo offers currently seem almost lackluster when compared the number of simliar Web 2.0 applications that exist that no only compete with Yahoo’s offering, but are better on many levels. Yahoo’s email service and search service had a revamp earlier this year, some services were let go, similar to what AOL was also doing earlier this year.
Those services that Yahoo has not cut, more often than not, they have been outsourced to other companies. Currently their subscription music service was relayed to Rhapsody music service to continue it’s music playback offerings.
Now Yahoo is looking at relaunching its LaunchCast service through CBS Radio
. AOL made a similar deal earlier this year to ease the burden of cost on the company. According to TechCrunch, “CBS provides streaming fo
r 144 owned radio stations, as well as providing some Internet-only content.” With this kind of backing it would make good business sense to relay some of the burden on the company and offset it with this partnership that will at least help continue the brands music offerings.
This partnership further extends to the marketing and advertising for LauchCast. CBS Radio will now take over all the ad sales, now being in control over offering placements for video and audio displays on the site. This transition looks to take place in early 2009, so fans of LaunchCast should have something to look forward to in the new year.
A Worthwhile Service?
I can’t reiterate enough how great of a move it was for Yahoo to offload the previously company maintained service onto CBS Radio. But I still can’t wrap my head around people who use the service and find it more valuable then the top services on the internet that offer the same if not better. I’m talking about Last.fm and Pandora.
Both of the above mentioned services offer users the ability to build their profiles and their listening preferences based on artists and genre of the user’s choice. The services will then continue to play the music that the algorithm believes you will like best. Sound simple enough, but when you add the social aspect to it by being able to share, connect, and see what others are listening to, the services are hard to beat.
I wish Yahoo luck with their re-launch, but I see services like this and AOL’s service quickly shrinking away into obscurity.
What’s your take on these services, and what do you see happening in the near future? Does anyone out there use LaunchCast? I’d especially like to hear your thoughts.
It’s not uncommon for us here at Crenk to come across web applications that do the same thing, the only differences are that some might do it better or worse than another. In this case, the team has come across a very interesting music listening application called 
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