Sitting at desk at office finishing up a few things, playing my U2 Pandora station, enjoying Radiohead’s “High And Dry”!Pandora is a"free" Internet music service. It allows you to create "channels" by selecting one or more artists of your choice. These artists can be popular, rock, rap, folk, classical, jazz; you name it. Even local artists may show up on Pandora if they have an identifiable musical style and recorded music available. Pandora then streams music to you from those artists and other artists that it deems similar to the ones that you selected.
I use Pandora. As I began writing this column, my Bela Fleck (Click here for link to belafleck.com) channel was playing and the current selection was a piece by the preeminent jazz bassist Stanley Clarke (Click her for link to stanleyclarke.com) called "Rite of Strings". (Bela Fleck is a banjo player extraordinaire whose work has spanned genres from bluegrass to folk to jazz fusion to classical. He has been nominated for Grammys in more different categories than anyone else. His band the Flecktones (Click here for link to flecktones.com) features another preeminent bass player, Victor Wooten (Click here for link to victorwooten.com). This may give you some idea how well Pandora's software works at finding affinity between your musical selections and its suggestions.)
I have numerous Pandora channels. You can use different Pandora channels to create a musical backdrop while using your computer at work or at home or on the move. You can add different artist together to "mix" a channel to your tastes. These channels can be shared through Pandora with your friends.
You get to listen for 30 hours each month free with advertising announcements occasionally dropped into your music stream. For a monthly payment you can upgrade to unlimited service and no advertising. You do not get to "keep" this music, either by download or playlist, but you can take Pandora anywhere for free and play your channels or create new ones because there is a mobile application for iPhones and Android phones. (See the discussion below about the potential costs of streaming music on a mobile device.)
Pandora has been in the financial news lately because it is very popular, but has not found a way to "make money". In other words, advertising revenue (often a key source of Internet revenue) and user fees are not paying for the cost of the service.
Spotify, which has proved wildly successful abroad, finally has entered the U.S. market. You need an “invitation” to get it, but you can request one online from Spotify.com. Spotify is a separate music player that loads outside your browser, like iTunes. (Pandora runs inside your web browser as a separate tab.) Spotify recognizes and plays your iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries as well as its own music catalog.
Spotify also recognizes mobile devices that you have connected to your computer, such as an iPod and iPhone and Android phones, so you can sync MP3 files. (You will need to have the Spotify app on these devices to take advantage of this feature. To sync with a mobile phone you must us a WiFi connection.)
Spotify lets you listen to tons of steaming music, even new releases, without downloading. You can create playlists or listen to entire albums. And Spotify is "FREE"! That's right, the basic service is free and you get access to all kinds of music that the record companies have previously tried to hold back. (Yes, there are exceptions: no Beatles, Led Zeppelin, etc.)
Spotify also recognizes mobile devices that you have connected to your computer, such as an iPod and iPhone and Android phones, so you can sync MP3 files. (You will need to have the Spotify app on these devices to take advantage of this feature. To sync with a mobile phone you must us a WiFi connection.)
Spotify lets you listen to tons of steaming music, even new releases, without downloading. You can create playlists or listen to entire albums. And Spotify is "FREE"! That's right, the basic service is free and you get access to all kinds of music that the record companies have previously tried to hold back. (Yes, there are exceptions: no Beatles, Led Zeppelin, etc.)
This is a BIG step forward with respect to Internet music distribution. For more on this development, see David Pogue's column in the New York Time at this link (David Pogue's column on Spotify).
There are paid upgrades for Spotify. Like Pandora, the upgrades remove commercials, but the free player is great. The only negatives I have found so far are that you have have a premium service plan at $10 a month to stream music on your phone or other mobile device and that search function on the player for finding music could be better at getting you to the music that you want to hear. The premium plan for mobile streaming likely will hold down mobile usage.
A note of caution about streaming music on a mobile device: streaming music on a mobile device usually sucks up significant bandwidth. No matter what device you use, if you are using your cellular carrier's data service to stream the music and you do not have an unlimited data plan at a monthly fee, you may see significant data charges on your bills. With the predicted demise of unlimited broadband plans from cellular services, mobile users could be paying a lot more than $10 a month to stream music when data plan charges are considered. If you are streaming music on a mobile device, it is best to do it over a WiFi network to avoid cellular data charges.
Finally, you may want to consider your personal listening preferences. I like lots of different music, but I generally like to select music from a wide range of sources. In earlier columns I have written about the music on my iPod. To get music onto an iPod, you must use iTunes. Whether you use iTunes as a music player on your computer is up to you, but it is a very good music player. By default, I end up using iTunes as a music player as well as a way to make playlists for my iPod or for burning to disks.
I generally have my iPod on the "shuffle" setting and I get a very interesting music mix. Let's first compare this approach with my experience with Pandora.
Recently my iPod was playing "New South Africa" by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, a rather jazzy banjo driven song, with strong bass lines from Victor Wooten. My iPod then shuffled the following songs (remember that shuffle is a random selection): "Back in the U.S.S.R." by The Beatles from the Love soundtrack, "Send in the Clowns" by Frank Sinatra, "For the Turnstiles" by Neil Young (which features a banjo), "Blackbird/Yesterday" by The Beatles from the Love soundtrack, and "Beeswing" by Richard Thompson. I was quite pleased with all of this and the random selection did not bother me. (Please note that iTunes now has a "Genius" feature that goes through your music library and makes intelligent suggestions for playlists.)
A note of caution about streaming music on a mobile device: streaming music on a mobile device usually sucks up significant bandwidth. No matter what device you use, if you are using your cellular carrier's data service to stream the music and you do not have an unlimited data plan at a monthly fee, you may see significant data charges on your bills. With the predicted demise of unlimited broadband plans from cellular services, mobile users could be paying a lot more than $10 a month to stream music when data plan charges are considered. If you are streaming music on a mobile device, it is best to do it over a WiFi network to avoid cellular data charges.
Finally, you may want to consider your personal listening preferences. I like lots of different music, but I generally like to select music from a wide range of sources. In earlier columns I have written about the music on my iPod. To get music onto an iPod, you must use iTunes. Whether you use iTunes as a music player on your computer is up to you, but it is a very good music player. By default, I end up using iTunes as a music player as well as a way to make playlists for my iPod or for burning to disks.
I generally have my iPod on the "shuffle" setting and I get a very interesting music mix. Let's first compare this approach with my experience with Pandora.
Recently my iPod was playing "New South Africa" by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, a rather jazzy banjo driven song, with strong bass lines from Victor Wooten. My iPod then shuffled the following songs (remember that shuffle is a random selection): "Back in the U.S.S.R." by The Beatles from the Love soundtrack, "Send in the Clowns" by Frank Sinatra, "For the Turnstiles" by Neil Young (which features a banjo), "Blackbird/Yesterday" by The Beatles from the Love soundtrack, and "Beeswing" by Richard Thompson. I was quite pleased with all of this and the random selection did not bother me. (Please note that iTunes now has a "Genius" feature that goes through your music library and makes intelligent suggestions for playlists.)
Pandora operates differently. You cannot decide to listen to an entire recording by Bela Fleck or just music by Bela Fleck. When you create a channel, Pandora will play music from the artist or artists that you have selected each time that you start playing that channel and then intermittently as the channel continues to play. It will select other similar artist to play in between. So, my Bela Fleck channel will follow a song by Bela Fleck with music from Stanley Clarke, David Grisman, Jerry Douglas, or Edgar Meyer or groups that I have not heard, like Quintet Of The Hot Club Of San Francisco, which share thematic elements with Bela Fleck. You can skip forward on Pandora, but not backwards. Pandora also provides a wealth of information about the artists and the recording from which the music comes. Most importantly to Pandora's business model, it provides links to buy the music to which you are listening. Pandora's deal with the music industry in providing this music free is that in return it will promote sales of the music.
Spotify has a different approach. It is similar to going into a large music library (like the iTunes online music catalog) and listening to whatever you want. For free. "Free" is the big difference between the Spotify music catalog and the iTunes music catalog. You can sample things online with iTunes, but you have to buy to listen to the complete recording.
On Spotify, you can pick one song by an artist or a whole album and listen as much as you want. Recently, I listened to Emmylou Harris' latest release Hard Bargain in its entirety. Someone recommended the group Airborne Toxic Event to me. I went and listened to its most recent release on Spotify. My daughters and I were going to an O.A.R. (Of a Revolution) concert. Never having heard any of O.A.R.'s music, I listened to a live concert recording on Spotify. You can build playlists of songs you like on Spotify, just as you can in iTunes. Over time you can build your own library of music by creating such playlists. (When I first connected, Spotify sent me a link to a playlist that it has created called "Hello America" that I could download in Spotify to get started.)
Spotify does not let you move this music around unless you buy it. You cannot download your online playlists to a mobile device. You cannot burn them to disk. As with iTunes, you have to own the mucis to do that.
Also, Spotify does not have is a shuffle feature. This makes sense as Spotify offers you the whole universe of music, unlike iTunes which shuffles only the the songs that you have loaded into a library.
So Spotify is the next big thing with respect to Internet music. The question remains whether it will make money. Spotify does have the distinction, however, of finally getting the music industry to loosen up and let people access great music on the Internet. Let's hope that lasts.
