SiriusXM to Acquire Pandora
blog.pandora.com
blog.pandora.com
I get the sense that the pendulum is going to start swinging back again soon. The media companies have almost won control again, and they're going to repeat the same mistakes that they made before. The difference now is that they have the internet under fuller control. PirateBay, Grooveshark, Limewire, Napster. Those are the music distribution channels that I grew up with because the media companies squeezed too hard. I'm happy to pay for music, but I'm not happy to pay 5 different subscriptions to listen to a small amount of their libraries. When I buy music, I want it to be mine. I don't want to have access to someone else's music. It's my collection. My impression is that people haven't realized this yet, but they will.
Soundcloud is a zombie - effectively dead. They abandoned their business model so they could grow more, and ceded power to the large record labels.
Try looking for Jay-Z's "The Blueprint" on Spotify.
How many people do you know who have a Deezer account?
SiriusXM's acquisition of Pandora is like Verizon's acquisition of AOL. They're grabbing the long tail of users and platform integrations so that they have the negotiating power with Universal, WB, and Sony to push out the same music that our parents (and now, even their parents) listened to.
I, for one, welcome the consolidation. The harder you lock the sidewalks down, the richer the underground becomes. And the underground is where creativity thrives.
The solutions to illegally acquired music will have different technical implementations, but the same effect (ipv6 feels like it will be necessary in this), and my suspicion is that we'll start heading back that way in the next few years.
For me, Bandcamp has been the best site that holds true to this idea. My favorite band started releasing all of their music through Bandcamp because the pricing is fair for artists. And as a listener, I can download the music to my machine or stream it from the app after I have purchased it.
Also, CDBaby and Magnatune are still great sites for their respective niches.
(CDBaby started as a more traditional CD distributor and has moved increasingly into digital distribution, as opposed to Bandcamp starting with digital distribution and moving to physical distribution. Anyway, CDBaby has a larger back catalog of "older" stuff, and still some cases of for instance bands don't have digital distribution rights to their own stuff, but piles of old CDs to sell.)
(Magnatune is a "not evil" record label. So their content is limited to just stuff they've "signed", but it's a beautiful, eclectic mix of stuff. Much of which you'll see reused in small to medium projects such as the videogame Braid's soundtrack, because their licensing has a good spectrum from non-commercial Creative Commons usage to relatively affordable commercial usage.)
I really prefer that model, if we're being honest. I like bands, but not a huge fan of labels (and unfortunately, whereas they were helpful for discovery before, they really aren't anymore). Would rather my money go to them with a smaller cut to platforms hosting it.
On the topic of DMCA notice bots, they fail to respond to DMCA counter notices FYI, and both Comcast and Centurylink do not handle counter notices properly (despite the latter claiming to).
IMO a DMCA notice that gets counter noticed (where the receiver of the DMCA notice asks for more details, as they are unable to verify any infringement) and doesn't get responded to should go as a black mark against the group that sent the original DMCA notice, as it was a plainly fraudulent DMCA notice.
It was heads and shoulders above the rest, especially when it came to international content and recommendations. Their recommendations were amazing.
RIP Rdio.
Their call center is horrendous but at least if you threaten to cancel they will magically find another special that’s good for 6 months. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Don’t even get me started with their additional fees that they try and mask as being regulatory/licensing. That’s their freaking business, to license content so they can broadcast it. Just like the airlines, it pisses me off when they try and pass their cost of doing business (actually the whole basis of the product) off as an additional fee.
I will never do business with them again due to these deceptive practices. Hopefully I’m not the only one.
Luckily, I have the choice of getting gfiber for 1/3 the cost of comcast.
Note that BMW and other "lux" makers are now offering deeper integration with phone apps... but they make you pay a subscription to them to enable said functionality. https://www.bmwusa.com/explore/connecteddrive.html describes it; half the features are free but traffic for the nav, integration with mobile apps, other features have an annual cost, around $50 US currently.
And yes, fair point on the 6 month complaint cycle being forced on us by obnoxious subscription approaches.
I started shuffling my music library onto USB sticks for my car and haven't looked back.
Acquiring Pandora could be huge for SiriusXM provided they integrate Pandora into the SiriusXM app and don't raise SiriusXM packages beyond the historic rate of package price increases.
Pandora user count: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2017/11/03/pandora...
SirusXM User Count: http://investor.siriusxm.com/investor-overview/press-release...
The fact that SirusXM wants you to pay extra for their streaming service after you're already spending ~$16/month/radio makes me think that any kind of "reasonably priced" bundle is very unlikely.
My car came with 3 years of sirius xm...3 years. Free.
Sometimes though I really want to listen to a particular artist and I use Amazon Music Unlimited for that, but their playlists are not as good (to me) as Pandora.
Frankly the user experience for their app has needed help for at least a couple years.
The only reason why I think that may be the case is because Pandora has been doing it so well for a long time.
I've never managed to get that out of other services. Am I doing things wrong? I'm all ears for suggestions, especially now that Pandora might go through some changes due to acquisition.
I don't know Pandora or Youtube (though I have generally bad experience with its suggestions), but am pretty happy with Spotify.
This is exactly why I like Pandora, to the point of it being eerie at times.
Like that one time when I was listening to a Trans Am[1] CD in my car, and thought - well, I've listened to that disk enough times already; let's listen to something new on Pandora -- and it gave me that exact track, while the band never popped up on any of my stations before!
The band was not a station seed, and it's not a band with a huge presence either - I got their CD randomly somewhere.
I know it's a coincidence, but just goes to show how well their algorithms are tuned.
It's like comparing weeds growing in your backyard to a carefully trimmed bonsai tree.
However, I'd go to Youtube for hand-picked playlists. There's always a place for that.
And sadly this isn't even the case. I recently purchased a new car that came with the SiriusXM 3-month trial. We drop reception in the country and in town (among tall buildings). In fact, it drops more often than mobile internet (why doesn't XM have 10s buffer?).
The subscription is also more expensive than Apple Music or Google Play Music and the car comes with Android Auto and CarPlay. How they expect to compete is beyond me. I guess that's why they bought Pandora.
It's odd because some of the first generation Sirius radios touted "DVR" like functionality, which makes it clear that buffering is possible. I would imagine they started to phase out that element of the hardware because of cost (especially since most are bundled with the vehicle)
In the same line of thinking, my navigation apps (Google Maps and Waze) also glitch out when driving through extended length tunnels (under Boston for example). I find this odd given that the app knows my route, and these tunnels are used by millions each year.
Really, it was just limited to the amount of storage you had. I think the one I did allowed up to 30 minutes but of course you lost it when you switched channels.
The music is so insanely compressed (the best channels were 32 kbit AAC+) and RAM/Flash is so much cheaper now, it could really be anything you wanted these days.
The satellite signal itself has a bit of time diversity in it (in case one of the birds disappears), like about 1500 mSec worth, as well as terrestrial backup transmitters in most cities (SXM's dirty little secret), so if you really have loss of signal you must be underground for a while.
A modern service could broadcast music files to your radio and then just schedule those, rather than sending a stream like a FM radio. But that's not how Sirius works now.
I told her I never tried it; the car had CarPlay and I plugged in with Spotify right away.
She didn't even bother trying to convince me to use the service. "Oh, yeah, I can see how convenient that is. Let us know if you ever change your mind."
They're presumably paying a premium on the current stock price.