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Western Digital Unveils WD TV Live HD Media Player

Ryan Whitwam — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:41:28 -0500

Western Digital has announced the second iteration of its TV connected media player. The new WD TV Live HD takes all that was awesome about the old, and adds some new tricks. The box still has wide codec support for playing files from USB drives, but it now also streams content from Youtube, Pandora, and Flickr. Users can also connect network drives to the new version to view files.

The WD TV Live HD, as the name would suggest, outputs 1080P HD video via a HDMI 1.3 port. Composite and component are also available. If you need to get video off that USB drive and on to your TV, the WD TVs provide an attractive alternative to media center PCs. The new WD TV device has an MSRP of $149.99.

Pandora Thinks Radio Stations Should Also Pay for Music Rights

Andy Salisbury — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:25:11 -0500

With revenues from music sales declining, many record labels have directed their attention to commercial US radio stations, who pay songwriters, not performers or record labels, for the songs that keep them moving.

And, it would appear, that these labels have Pandora Radio on their side. Pandora’s web model causes them to pay more for their music, which founder Tim Westergren sees as “fundamentally unfair both to Internet radio services like Pandora, which pay higher royalties than other forms of radio, and to musical artists, who receive no compensation at all when their music is played on AM/FM radio.”

Radio stations feel that they’re instead promoters of music, and their goal is to drive interest in artists. In turn, this will lead to more album and ticket sales, as well as more publicity opportunities. Though, one would have to wonder, how does this effect not apply to Pandora, and other forms of Internet radio?

Let us know what you think after the break.

Image Credit: Pandora

Internet Radio Gets a Break, Pandora Adds $0.99 Fee

Paul Lilly — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:16:04 -0500

With the threat of streaming rates for Internet radio rising to levels far above what many services could afford to pay, the future of Pandora and other Internet radio outlets remained very much in limbo. That's no longer the case, at least for Pandora, which reached an agreement everyone involved appears to be happy with.

"Pandora is finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates," said Pandora CTO Tom Conrad.

For Pandora, the resolution means a 40-50 percent reduction in the per-song-per-listener rates. In exchange, Pandora will give up either a 25 percent share of its U.S. revenue, or the per-song-per-listener number, whichever is higher.

For Pandora's user base, the resolution means that anyone who uses the service over 40 hours per month will have to cough up $0.99 for unlimited access. The nominal fee is to help offset the royalty agreement, and is expected to only affect 10 percent of Pandora's users.

Despite the 25 percent royalty rate, Conrad remains optimistic that Pandora will reach its stated goal to be profitable by next year.

Popular Streaming App Pandora Launches Premium Service With Desktop App

Andy Salisbury — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:30:46 -0500

Chances are good that if you’re a fan of streaming music online, you’ve heard of Pandora. And, apparently users of the service like it so much that they’ve actually been asking about ways to pay the company to guarantee its survival. At long last those (strange) questions have been answered, with the introduction of Pandora One.

Pandora One is a subscription-based model allowing users that shell out $36 a year access to some premium options. First off, premium users will no longer have to put up with ads of any kind (this includes the in-stream audio ads). Secondly, and most notably, they’ll gain access to a Pandora desktop app that includes high quality streaming audio (bumped up to 192 kbps), a personalized look, a mini player, and extended player time outs.

For many of us, the free-to-use service is just fine as is. The ads that are currently keeping it alive aren’t very invasive (even the audio ones), and with apps such as OpenPandora out there it’s admittedly a tough sell. But, for those looking to show their love for their favorite online streaming service, $36/year isn’t too bad a price.

Image Credit: Pandora

White Paper: How Your Favorite Music Discovery Services Work

Michael Brown — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:15:00 -0600

Listen to the mind-numbingly repetitive radio programming on the FM dial long enough, no matter which genre you prefer, and you might conclude that only a handful of recording artists are worth listening to.

Fire up your PC and tune in to Internet radio, on the other hand, and you’ll discover an embarrassment of riches, nearly all of which you can enjoy for free and without—or at least with very little—commercial interruption. In fact, there’s so much music that you might find yourself overwhelmed. That’s where the music discovery services Last.fm, Pandora, and Slacker come in. All three services help you discover new music based on the songs and artists you express a preference for. As interesting as that concept is, what’s even more remarkable is that each service takes a completely different approach to the mission. Let’s take a look at all three.

Last.fm

Last.fm mixes Internet radio with aspects of social networking. The service started out as an Internet radio station that allowed listeners to express their preference or disdain for particular songs by using a Love or Ban button. Last.fm used this information to develop a unique profile for each user and to create dynamic playlists.

The service was later merged with the Audioscrobbler music-discovery system, a stand-alone application originally designed to record the music played on registered computers. This enabled Last.fm to collect statistics that could chart a track’s worldwide popularity. Each time you listen to a song—whether it be online or from your personal library—the tune gets “scrobbled,” meaning its title is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.

Last.fm analyzes your initial list of favorite artists (which you provide when you first sign up), your personal music collection, and your expressed preferences (based on your use of the Love and Ban buttons) and begins streaming songs it thinks you’ll enjoy. In that respect, it’s not terribly different from Pandora or Slacker; Last.fm becomes unique when you take its community aspect into consideration. Subscribers can join groups based on common interests, create friends lists, and view each other’s profiles. Profiles list tracks the person has recently listened to, songs in their library, as well as charts listing their top artists and tracks. The service also uses a collaborative filtering algorithm to compare your preferences with those of like-minded subscribers and build a personal recommendations page.

Pandora

Pandora takes a more scientific approach to music discovery. The company’s founders started an initiative called the Music Genome Project in 2000, with the goal of analyzing the fundamental elements of a song, and Pandora uses this data to analyze the music you listen to on the service and then recommends other songs and artists you might enjoy.

Pandora’s musicologists go much further than simply breaking a song down to its hook, chorus, and bridge; following the basic tenets of music theory, they scrutinize each song for as many as 400 distinct musical characteristics. They identify attributes ranging from major/minor key tonality (whether a song’s harmony is based on a major or minor musical scale), level of syncopation (a rhythmic quality in which emphasis is placed on upbeats, versus the more conventional downbeat), and instrumentation (which types of musical instruments are featured in the song, including a distinction between electrified and acoustic instruments). You’ll find a more complete listing at Pandora's website.

Pandora has 50 musicologists on staff adding some 15,000 tracks to the Music Genome and Pandora databases each month. When you sign up for the service, you provide it with one of your favorite songs or artists and it will use an algorithm to pick other songs and artists from its database that it predicts you’ll also enjoy.

When we told Pandora we enjoyed folk artist Guy Clark, for instance, it began playing Kris Kristofferson’s “Pilgrims Progress.” Since we hadn’t given Kristofferson much thought since the 1998 Wesley Snipes vampire flick Blade, we clicked the “Why was this song selected?” button. Pandora replied, “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features folk roots, country influences, gospel influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, and acoustic sonority.”

Slacker

Slacker’s name is somewhat ironic since it could be argued that this service is powered more by human effort than either Last.fm or Pandora. Like those two Internet radio stations, Slacker uses algorithms to analyze your expressed preferences and then recommend music it thinks you’ll enjoy, but Slacker is unique in that it hires professional deejays to program its stations (which is to say the deejays are choosing which songs are played on the radio stations, not that they’re writing the software that runs the show).

Slacker has 120 prefab stations, and each deejay is responsible for programming just one or two of them to ensure that the person populating the playlists is an expert in that genre. The deejays also monitor what users are listening to (or skipping, as the case may be) in order to track which songs are trending popular; they’ll then increase their rotation so that they’re played more often. But they also take care to avoid playing a particular song so much that listeners grow tired of hearing it.

Subscribers can also create custom stations based on their own musical tastes, using the familiar Love It/Ban It buttons. As you populate the station with your favorite artists, Slacker will recommend other artists in the same genre. You can fine-tune your Slacker stations with slider controls that boost or limit the degree to which the service’s recommendation algorithms expose you to new artists, play popular or more obscure tracks, and select primarily older classics or new releases.

Some Progress Made in Internet Radio Royalty Dispute, Though it's Not Enough

Andy Salisbury — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:15:37 -0500

The online music industry has always been a touchy one, but today the world came a step closer to ending online royalty disputes. An agreement that’s being called a “breakthrough that will facilitate new ways to offer music to consumers online,” songwriters, music publishers, record labels and digital music websites have concluded a seven year dispute over mechanical royalties and limited music downloads.

Mechanical royalties are the fees paid to songwriters, composers and publishers of music, not the person that only preformed it or the record company that produced the recording. Limited music downloads are downloads with restrictions attached, such as the model used by Napster To Go. iTunes, however isn’t considered limited use because you can listen to your songs as often as you want, without a monthly fee.

As landmark as this settlement is, it still leaves a big hole on the controversial topic of Internet radio. Sites such as Pandora and Live365 remain in a high-stakes standoff with SoundExchange, the company in charge of collecting the fees for artists and record companies. The reason that sites such as these were left out from the normal Internet radio agreement is because they allow users to select the music that they want to listen to, as opposed to simply listening to a pre-determined stream of songs.

Image Credit: Pandora

A New Kind of Radio

Michael Brown — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:39:18 -0600

I dig subscription-music services like Rhapsody, because they enable me to indulge my diverse musical tastes without investing a fortune in CDs; it’s like having the world’s biggest music library right at my fingertips. And I spend an extra $5 per month for the privilege of copying those rented tracks to an MP3 player. Most months, however, that fin is wasted because I forgot or just didn’t have time to update the library on the player. I think Slacker is about to solve my problem.

Slacker started life as a music-discovery service much like the Internet-radio services Last.FM and Pandora. But the company’s management team, staffed in large measure by veterans from iRiver and Rio, always intended to offer more than a service—they wanted to sell the razor as well as the blades. So now they’re following up the Slacker service with three models of the Slacker Portable Radio Player.

Unlike the typical MP3 player, which relies on you to fill it with music, the Slacker players will automatically suck down tracks over a Wi-Fi connection and store them for playback. The $200 model will allow you to monitor up to 15 stations; there will also be a $250 model with room for 25 stations and $300 SKU capable of tuning 40 stations.

You manage the stations you listen to using a PC- or Mac-based web browser, but you can also express your preferences for songs using the handheld device: Pressing the “heart” button on the player while listening to a track tells the service you like this kind of music and want to hear more songs like it; pressing the “ban” button ensures you’ll never hear it again. Your preferences are uploaded to the service whenever it can connect to the Internet.

Due to royalty agreements with the record labels, the free version of Slacker’s software limits you to skipping six songs each hour; you’ll also hear the occasional commercial. Signing up for the subscription service ($90 annually, in addition to the cost of the player) eliminates the restriction and the ads. It also gives you the freedom to store songs so you can play them on demand.

I’ll post a hands-on review as soon as I get my hands on the hardware.