arc of time

this morning i seeded a pandora station with “the bends.”

since then it has been serving up what could be the best radio ever.

enjoy it.

i created a station called YAY! for singer-songwriters on pandora.

now, whatever, i am a fan of the genre and you can poke sticks at me all you want i am not changing my mind.

however, i have to admit that the genre has a TON of crap music in it as the station is starting to reveal.

it’s probably because any idiot with an acoustic guitar and a macbook can record an album in a night.

every now and again, pandora does something i just can’t quite grasp. i have been patiently working on a station called ‘indie fun’ for some time, seeded by some modest mouse, new pornographers and rilo kiley. the station has been pretty dead on, playing a whole range of good stuff, both known and unknown; i.e. the icicles, the charlatans, black rebel motorcycle club, etc.

and then three minutes ago it started playing ashlee simpson.

huh?!?!?!?

it appears that the internet radio day of silence* was a success.

from pandora founder tim westergren’s blog:

As of midnight we’ve turned Pandora back on. Once again the response from listeners today was just extraordinary. You folks continue to amaze me. You brought down the server system for the country’s most robust provider of online petitions (they said they’ve NEVER seen anything like it before) Virtually every congressional office was jammed with phone calls all day. Make no mistake – each call makes a HUGE difference.

if you still want to help out, plenty of time to call your congresspeople, just visit the save net radio site for more information.

honestly, i became just how aware of how powerful net radio had become for emerging artists and fans and artists in less popular genres of music when i visited tim westergren’s open forum in atlanta and saw just how passionate the people there were about their experiences with pandora; artists and fans alike.

honestly, if i hadn’t gone to that i don’t know if i would have made calls to the capitol.

so i navigated over to pandora today looking forward to listening to my alt.rock-alt.folk station i have been so assiduously building. that being said i was out of luck.

today net radio operators are observing a day of silence to protest the raising of royalty rates by the copyright review board. i have written before about why i support changing this decision so i won’t recap that.

believe it or not, apatetic me actually placed a call to johnny isakson and saxby chamblis asking them to get on board with legislation that would reverse the decision.

sure, it’s one special interest against another, but in this particular instance, one special interest just happens to be more right.

if you are interested in learning more or getting involved go to savenetradio.org.

it’s hard for me to think of an industry that goes out of its way to spit in the face of it’s customers more than the recording industry. there were of course, the infamous 2003 lawsuits against 12 year old kids and 71 year old grandfathers over file sharing.

this year saw swat-team style riaa representatives with stupid wanna-be fbi jackets raiding a warehouse with fulton county officers and arresting two atlanta dj’s who really were helping artists promote their music.

and now, of course, they are coming after internet radio. this article in businessweek is all about how the recording industry is now going to impose much higher royalties for internet radio than before. most internet radio is licensed under the digital millenium copyright act (dmca) and royalty questions are heard by the copyright royalty board. soundexchange, who collects the royalties for the recording industry, went before the board and got them to change the royalty structure from a percentage of revenue to a per-song fee.

according to the article this is going to spell huge increases in royalty payments for internet radio stations.

joe kennedy who is the ceo of my favorite internet radio site, pandora.com, is quoted in the article as saying:

I’m not aware of any Internet radio service that believes they can sustain a business at the rates set by this decision.

so there you go. internet radio delivers a cheap way for you to discover new music. because royalties were low and distribution costs cheap, sites like pandora could afford to expose you to a non-stop stream of commercial-free radio. you could find a great band you like while listening at work and then head right on over to amazon and buy them.

sounds good for you. sounds good for the internet radio station. sounds good for the artist.

so of course the recording industry wants to kill it.

again, record labels hate their customers. it’s the only conclusion anyone rational can draw.

last night, am and i went to listen to tim westergren, the founder of pandora internet radio give a presentation at the defoor center.

you may remember i got the chance to interview tim for a post on the atlanta metroblog (here) a week or so ago so even though i was exhausted from the trip to vegas i felt obligated to go.

tim did not disappoint. he told a great story about how pandora and the music genome project was created. but more importantly he totally responded to the passion of the users/listeners. and they were passionate. one guy described pandora as ‘leveling the playing field’ for artists and genres that don’t attract big marketing attention.

i’ll probably discuss in more detail in a web remix column about it and cover in more detail, but figured i could dump initial impressions here.

in the meantime i am motivated to try to interact with pandora at a deeper level.

right now i am trying to create a pop punk fun station.

i got some great feedback from the guys at the beggar’s guild on online marketing of bands for the next installment of web remix on soulpress.net. friday i am interviewing tim westergren, founder of pandora, for metroblogging atlanta.

and i have also undertaken the 365 days flickr project, where is will be taking a self-portrait snapshot every day for a year. check out the set here