Showing posts with label pandora. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pandora. Show all posts

Thursday, November 01, 2012

Pandora "Gets" Mobile

Image representing Pandora as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase
Mobile is not an easy nut to crack. Ask Facebook, ask Zynga. It helped that they started early. It also helps music is made for mobile.

First look: Pandora 4.0, the new mobile frontier
"We started thinking about creating a mobile service in 2004," Pandora CTO Tom Conrad told us in an interview. "We wanted to unify the Pandora experience." ..... and Pandora found itself one of the top five most downloaded mobile applications. Over the next four years 75 percent of Pandora listening shifted to smartphones. The company says that over 115 million registered users have tuned into the service on a smart mobile. The platform represents around 55 percent of its advertising revenue. ....... Pandora 4.0 for iOS smartphones goes live for download in the App Store at 5 pm EDT on Monday, 29 October. The Android version is going to take a little longer to show up in Google Play—"in the coming weeks," we were told. The upgrades arrive as the smartphone radio field is diversifying and expanding. Pandora still has a huge profile, but is hardly the only kid on the block. Spotify, Rdio, Last.fm, Turntable.fm all have big followings in the United States. Even Apple has been making noises about setting up a Pandora rival for the iPhone and iPad. ..... "When we launched in 2005, AOL and Microsoft were the largest services; MySpace was the gorilla in the room," Conrad noted. "Clear Channel was getting serious about iHeartRadio. What has allowed us to succeed despite stiff competition is that we are dedicated to the future of radio. We have a simple, elegant product to which we are devoted, and which we think we can produce better than anybody else." ...... Pandora says about half of its revenues go to performance royalties. The proposed legislation in both its Senate and House forms would put rates on a par with those paid by satellite and cable-based radio services. ...... the rates paid to various artists featured on the service. Two thousand will receive over $10,000 each over the next 12 months. "And for more than 800 we'll pay over $50,000, more than the income of the average American household"
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Wednesday, November 16, 2011

The Spotify CTO Talk

Gaga performing on The Monster Ball Tour in Bu...Image via WikipediaSpotify USA, 76 9th Ave., Suite 1110, 11th Floor, New York, NY
Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 6:30 PM

Have you been wondering where Spotify's going both technically and as a tech organization? How do we get the music tracks to play so quickly? What's up with Spotify's data analytics and the data processing stack? What are Spotify's general architectural principles?

Come and hear about the 'big picture' of Spotify from the guys running the show. It's not often that they're all in town from Stockholm!

Speakers:

Oskar Staal - Chief Technology Officer
Mikael Krantz - Chief Architect
Henrik Landren - Head of Analytics
Wouter de Bie - Team Lead, Analytics Infrastructure

Agenda

6:30pm Mix and Mingle
7:00pm Presentations
8:00pm Q&A


GigaOm: Pandora: Spotify is our friend, not a competitor
Vimeo: Spotify – the story
The Register: Spotify looks for local spin guru: They really must be launching downunder
ZDNet: Spotify tops the charts for multi-platform support
TechNewsDaily: Spotify Hands-on: Worth the Hype?
Global Post: Swedish tech has its ABBA moment
Time: Today in Least Necessary Purchases: ‘Spotify For Dummies’
TechCrunch: Spotify Lands Major Studio Deals, Prepares To Launch Movie Service
Forbes: Facebook To Launch Music Service With Spotify
AllThingsD: Spotify’s U.S. Score So Far: 1.4 Million Users, 175,000 Paying Customers
Mashable: Spotify Eyes European Expansion [REPORT]
The Next Web: Spotify Opens for Business in Belgium and Switzerland
Mashable: Spotify Comes to Facebook [PICS]
LifeHacker: Spotify Is the Best Desktop Music Player We’ve Ever Used
New York Times: Spotify Loss Widens Despite Higher Revenue Its subscriptions, which cost about $10 to $15 a month, brought in $71 million, and the company also had $28 million in advertising. But its losses for the year totaled $42 million, up from $26 million 2009...... pays labels each time a listener streams a particular song. That system brings in lower royalties per song than downloads, but with a large enough listener base could in theory bring in substantial amounts ..... The company was believed to have more than 10 million total users.
TechCrunch: Welcome To Belgium, Spotify. (And To Austria And Switzerland)
Reuters: Spotify now has 250,000 paying U.S. users: sources
Forbes: Spotify Tries To Soothe Angry Users Over Facebook Conditions
AllThingsD: When Will Spotify Finally Come to the U.S.?
CNN: What's this Spotify thing all about?
ReadWriteWeb: Here's What Spotify's New Facebook Integration Looks Like
BusinessWeek: Record Sales Rise as Lady Gaga, Adele Find a Future With Spotify Music lovers are doing something they haven’t done in years: They’re buying more albums...... The number of albums sold this year has increased for the first time since 2004 .... Industry wide, sales of record albums, which include digital downloads, compact discs, some vinyl LPs and cassettes, are up 3 percent ...... Consumers who over the last several years rejected album prices of $14 to $15, and purchased singles instead, are now coming back to albums at lower prices. ..... “There is a significant market for the download of a total album for $9.99” ...... Levy and other industry executives see the pricing strategy as an investment. By making it easier for customers to buy albums they hope to gain market share and generate more interest in the music, eventually allowing them to profit from sources such as digital music platforms, merchandise, and concerts. ...... Adele’s “21,” for example, has so far sold 4.3 million copies in the U.S. this year, more than any other artist. ...... “An album like Adele’s is a concept album, enjoyed when the songs are not disaggregated,” Donio said. “She is doing well selling individual songs, but in cases like hers, the album is a work of art.” ...... Single track sales are up 10 percent to 1.055 billion so far for the year ..... When Lady Gaga released her second album, “Born This Way,” in May, Amazon.com held a one-day 99 cents sale that was so popular it overwhelmed the company’s Web servers. ....... Consumers also discover music through the growing popularity of services such as Rdio and Spotify. Though consumers can get music for free from these platforms, the services engage consumers and encourage them to make purchases, making them less likely to take part in illegal downloading ...... The Spotify service, Parks said, is helping to turn one- time music pirates into paying consumers. ....... “What Spotify has done is re-energized the base of music lovers,” Parks said in an interview. “Data shows that in all of the markets where Spotify operates, digital music sales have grown. We’re generating a lot of revenue for the industry from a generation that wasn’t buying music.”
NPR: How Spotify Works: Pay The Majors, Use P2P Technology
LA Times: Spotify's plan: get users hooked, then ask them to pay for music
Spotify - Wikipedia
Chicago Tribune: Spotify killed the radio star?
GigaOm: Indie labels stage another Spotify walkout

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Music Places



Recently I have taken to listening to a whole bunch of music on Tumblr.

The Music Tag On Tumblr

Some great places to go for music are these, in no particular order.

HypeMachine
Last.fm
Pandora
World Singles Chart
Shuffler
Soundtracking
Spotify
ViddyJam
Song Of The Day
SoundCloud

Two Hall of Famers would be Soraya Darabi and Fred Wilson, people who stand out in the NY tech ecosystem regardless, but I don't think that is accidental, great thinking in tech seems to go hand in hand with voracious consumption of good music. So listen: listen. They have great taste. They are both addicted to music.