[earbitscom]

I think these are all very legitimate concerns. We specifically switched from a "Type an Artist" search to a channel-based music selection process because people were not getting what they expected. That being said, the reason why Adwords has proven pointless for bands (a HUGE small business market) is because nobody is searching for band names they have never heard before. But, people search for good "speed metal" all of the time. We may not end up in a place where we can play Black Sabbath for people who search for it, but we meet the needs of people looking for "Southern Hip Hop" every day.

As for making sure artists don't fall victim to bad campaigns, we aren't expecting them to be SEM experts. Our team puts them in the right channels - so poor keyword selection is not an option (as in first time Adwords users). Additionally, we intend to provide not just reports, but optimization recommendations that will make it easy for an artist to turn off an underperforming song, and so on. And, for the sake of our listeners, we'll be deactivating songs that are performing very poorly on our own. We hope to avoid that by screening for quality, but sometimes a song does end up in the wrong channel. At the end of the day, we'll be benefiting from the understanding of search marketing, but be building a tool that serves artists.

As an aside, I have had zero luck on Pandora building me a good Black Sabbath station! And don't try to build one based on Blind Melon either. ;)