April 30th, 2009

Using Pandora Radio

Posted in Uncategorized

Initiated by Music Genome Project, Pandora radio is a form of automated music recommendation system that enables users to select an artist or song on request. The music broadcast on Pandora radio is also available for purchase on Amazon.com or iTunes Store as well as on other Internet websites. The complexity of the music selection system remains very high with plenty of criteria taken into consideration for the choice of the next play. The program features fall under several categories known as the focus traits, and there are around 2,000 such peculiarities specific to Pandora radio.

Since July 2008, there is a portable software version available for Pandora radio, and so far more than two million iPhone users are taking advantage of the application wherever they go. In the UK Pandora radio is hoping to be the main competitor to Dab Portable Radio. There are two versions of Pandora radio available, one is free and one is subscription-based; the advantages of the paid one is that there are no commercials whatsoever, while with the free variant they are included part of the service. As for the free variant, Pandora radio does depend on advertising like many other radio corporations.

The recent regulations passed by the Copyright Royalty Board determined Pandora radio to broadcast for the United States only, and while the terrestrial radios were unaffected by the rules, licensing guarantees and fees, online broadcasters have very few possibilities to continue their activities. Europeans who try to access Pandora Radio get an explanatory notification that their Euro-IP is barred and that the service is available in the United States only. Without this measure, Pandora Radio could not have supported financially the doubling of the fee-per-song required by the Copyright Royalty Board.

Next year, negotiations will continue to reopen Pandora Radio to the rest of the world if the taxes get lower. Rewind and repeat is not possible with the Pandora automated recommendation music system, all you can do is to ask for something similar to the song played before. Then, another restrictive feature of the program is the one that doesn’t allow more than six skips per hour. Finally, Pandora radio is not a play-on-demand system, and you will often get music similar to the request if not the exact one. The user’s freedom is to sample songs from a selected artist’s page.