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I’ve been pretty disparaging about Pandora’s business acumen in the past (twice). I love the service because it’s just so quick and easy to ‘get’ and I was intrigued by the Music Genome Project. Or, should I say, ‘loved’ - because, being non-American, I can’t use it anymore.
If you’re resident outside the US you probably received a similar email early in January 2008:
hi, it’s Tim,
This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.
As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.
Suddenly, I feel very bad. I castigated Pandora for, well, being incompetent or so I thought. It seems however that they’ve genuinely been trying to make it work despite a music industry that cannot get its head around the opportunities afforded by online music distribution.
EMI is already suffering, quite simply because it’s been taken over by someone who actually gets what’s going on. People don’t buy CDs any more. They download. They listen. They interact with other people who listen and download. People, and their preferences, are key. Not what executives think.
If I were an entrepreneur in the music industry I would look to enterprises such as Pandora as the best way to publicise my product. I have bought music on the back of the wonderfully creative Pandora algorithms.
And this is truly why I’m sad. Because, now that I’ve moved across to Last.fm - who are probably also in trouble but are less open about it than Pandora - I find that I’m listening to music I already know. I just moved from Beck to Flaming Lips to Radiohead, all of which I’m familiar with. Pandora would throw lovely unexpected moves at me. Last.fm isn’t doing this - yet.
Plus, it’s taken me a short while - just a short one, but a while nevertheless - to get myself up and running with Last.fm. And if I want to get other people interested in it, I have to persuade them to download software, which I didn’t with Pandora.
And is it just me, or does Last.fm keep skipping momentarily, while Pandora’s feed was rock-steady?
Oh well. Maybe I should emigrate to the USA then I can enjoy it all over again.
Three days ago (so my del.icio.us account tells me - and boy, do I find typing del.icio.us tedious with all those fullstops) I bookmarked a beautiful example of trigger-response: the article by Tom Hodgkinson in the Guardian lambasting Facebook and all that he thinks it stands for; and Shel Holz’s video response on seesmic (better with audio!).
Tom Hodgkinson doesn’t like Facebook one small bit. He doesn’t like the way it encourages people to interact solely through online sources, and he doesn’t like the organisations behind it.
As a result, Shel Holz is virtually apoplectic (seesmic?), and counters Tom’s claims in his typically (for people who listen to the FIR podcast) articulate way.
But there’s the rub: I said ‘articulate’. Because Shel was articulating, not typing and editing and re-editing. And when I say apoplectic, well here’s a screen grab from the video:
OK, maybe not apoplectic - as in, he’s not actually going red and keeling over backwards - but you can tell he’s fairly animated about it all. There’s another interesting word: animated.
Now, you could describe some writing as ‘animated’ but really, I could have read a transcript of what Shel was saying and forgotten it as it drowns in the sea of words I read every day.
But I don’t. I remember it simply because of all the other signals I was receiving, from the way he talked to the way he looked.
In fact, I remember Shel’s reaction much more vividly than I do Tom’s original piece.
So, I’m a convert. I do truly believe that video blogging has so much more impact than text or even podcasting that if you really want to communicate, you must do it.
Obviously there is still a place for the timid text bloggers like myself, and the audio podcasts you can zone out to during the daily commute.
But I’m going to keep an eye out - literally (not literally ‘out’, I don’t have a glass eye but you know what I mean) - for the rise of video blogging.
I’m going to monitor seesmic (when they sort out my login problems) and similar sites (when I get the time to find them) and hopefully, my human brain, with its strongly audio-visual bias, will retain so much more than acres of text.
This is the first of a series of tutorials. Aaargh!
Before you switch off - tutorials are such a bore - I’m going to try and make this actually interesting and relevant. There are so many tutorials on the web covering the same topics but I tend to find them a bit dry.
So I’m going to try and explain this stuff as I would have liked it explaining to me, or indeed as I explain it to other people. As someone once told me ”I’m having difficulty feeling the love with this.” So, my objective is to help you feel the love, hence the title.
I’ll be extending this across a range of tools and technologies - del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook etc - as well as cross-platform advice such as ‘How to search for stuff on the web.’ I’m also going to pitch them at basic, intermediate and advanced levels, so hopefully there’ll be something for everyone.
This one’s the basic level, also called ‘Getting to grips.’ It doesn’t cover the bells or whistles, it just explains briefly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, then takes you through to the point where you can actually use it.
It’s not the briefest tutorial style in the world because I like to get people interested and entertain them along the way. As it’s my first attempt at this I’d really appreciate any feedback, both positive and negative. Just let me know what you think.
So, first up: Getting to grips with Google Reader.
Before we start - is this for me?
If you’re finding that you spend more and more time having to scour the web for information, this is for you.
From a PR perspective, you’ll find it invaluable when monitoring online developments you need to know about. There are many conversations out there, on websites, review sites, forums and blogs. It’s a fair bet that at least some of them are about you or your client, or a product, service or brand you’re responsible for.
I have personal experience of picking up on news through Google Reader and flagging it to the client before anyone else. So Google Reader can help you win the information overload war, and your client’s favour.
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