| I'd argue that rivaling music, pandora's biggest product is their music recommendation system. It's second to none in my opinion. Google has clearly put together a good system too recently with their generated playlists, and last.fm has had similar recommendations. However, as far as a recommendation system that exposes you to new, different music you would have never selected on your own, Pandora makes good choices with surprising accuracy. Part of that is their Music Genome Project where human beings listened to every song Pandora hosted and rated every aspect of it. I'm sure now they just have a ton of other useful data from listening habits. Regardless, I think the music could almost be seen as secondary. If all Pandora wanted to do was have me pay $36 dollars for a weekly, automated newsletter telling me of new songs I might like and then collecting my feedback for future newsletters made for me, I'd likely pay for that. They could even alert me to new concerts in my area. Of course, the music streaming ties that all together in a really compelling way. So, I think if anything you could say that about 50% to musicians and 50% to programmers and staff and overhead sounds about right. Hopefully they manage to eek out a profit to stick around. They'll be greatly missed if all that's left one day is iHeartRadio and the same old industry pushing the same old method of selecting hits. Pandora is undeniably a good way to listen to music, and all anyone wants is to ensure they have a fair way to compete. No one likes seeing artists go hungry. But we all also recognize that if there's anyone being unfair to artists, it's the mega industry from the prior era. The new industry involves artists owning their work and paying $50/year at TuneCore or similar companies to get their music distributed to companies such as Pandora. Or, they sign up to traditional album sellers like BandCamp or CDBaby. It's simply the most efficient way to do it now. Absolutely we appreciate the music industry for almost a century of fantastic art and culture. But they either need to adapt or gracefully accept their new role, which is a purveyor of American classics and the niche hype machine for the few mega acts of pop music who actually get good terms on their contracts with major labels. |