I haven't had a chance to rant about this in a while, so, I'll warn you that a rant is ahead.
I get the sense that the pendulum is going to start swinging back again soon. The media companies have almost won control again, and they're going to repeat the same mistakes that they made before. The difference now is that they have the internet under fuller control. PirateBay, Grooveshark, Limewire, Napster. Those are the music distribution channels that I grew up with because the media companies squeezed too hard. I'm happy to pay for music, but I'm not happy to pay 5 different subscriptions to listen to a small amount of their libraries. When I buy music, I want it to be mine. I don't want to have access to someone else's music. It's my collection. My impression is that people haven't realized this yet, but they will.
Soundcloud is a zombie - effectively dead. They abandoned their business model so they could grow more, and ceded power to the large record labels.
Try looking for Jay-Z's "The Blueprint" on Spotify.
How many people do you know who have a Deezer account?
SiriusXM's acquisition of Pandora is like Verizon's acquisition of AOL. They're grabbing the long tail of users and platform integrations so that they have the negotiating power with Universal, WB, and Sony to push out the same music that our parents (and now, even their parents) listened to.
I, for one, welcome the consolidation. The harder you lock the sidewalks down, the richer the underground becomes. And the underground is where creativity thrives.
The solutions to illegally acquired music will have different technical implementations, but the same effect (ipv6 feels like it will be necessary in this), and my suspicion is that we'll start heading back that way in the next few years.
For me, Bandcamp has been the best site that holds true to this idea. My favorite band started releasing all of their music through Bandcamp because the pricing is fair for artists. And as a listener, I can download the music to my machine or stream it from the app after I have purchased it.
Yeah, I try to search artists I find on Bandcamp first.
Also, CDBaby and Magnatune are still great sites for their respective niches.
(CDBaby started as a more traditional CD distributor and has moved increasingly into digital distribution, as opposed to Bandcamp starting with digital distribution and moving to physical distribution. Anyway, CDBaby has a larger back catalog of "older" stuff, and still some cases of for instance bands don't have digital distribution rights to their own stuff, but piles of old CDs to sell.)
(Magnatune is a "not evil" record label. So their content is limited to just stuff they've "signed", but it's a beautiful, eclectic mix of stuff. Much of which you'll see reused in small to medium projects such as the videogame Braid's soundtrack, because their licensing has a good spectrum from non-commercial Creative Commons usage to relatively affordable commercial usage.)
One of my favorite musicians (Rhys Fulber, mostly due to Conjure One and Delerium for me) started releasing music on Bandcamp. Admittedly, the new cd really isn't my cup of tea, but I bought it from there anyway. Can't remember what the minimum price was, but I bumped it up to $20 US (think it was calculating in euros, iirc. I do remember having to use a currency converter on another site to pick the amount when buying it).
I really prefer that model, if we're being honest. I like bands, but not a huge fan of labels (and unfortunately, whereas they were helpful for discovery before, they really aren't anymore). Would rather my money go to them with a smaller cut to platforms hosting it.
IPv6 fixes the problem of NAT, and for now most of the copyright spam bots have no support for IPv6. On mobile, IPv6 provides connectivity that is tens of milliseconds better, and wireline providers like Centurylink have direct peering only on IPv6 to Hurricane Electric and other price oriented, IPv6 first mover transit providers
On the topic of DMCA notice bots, they fail to respond to DMCA counter notices FYI, and both Comcast and Centurylink do not handle counter notices properly (despite the latter claiming to).
IMO a DMCA notice that gets counter noticed (where the receiver of the DMCA notice asks for more details, as they are unable to verify any infringement) and doesn't get responded to should go as a black mark against the group that sent the original DMCA notice, as it was a plainly fraudulent DMCA notice.
A long time ago, when Last.fm started, it had the option to play music similar to two or more artists. You would write the artists separated by a comma and you would get a playlist of artists which were similar. That was really good.
A very VERY long time ago was echo.com. It's hard to find any information about it now. But it was a streaming music site that let you rate the artist, album, and song individually with stars, and it would use those ratings to make recommendations to you. Also as you accumulated listening hours you earned Amazon gift certificates. I wish someone out there remembered them besides me.
If I'm not mistaken, Rdio's engineering team helped build Pandora's on-demand service. I've switched to it from Spotify after using Rdio in the past. Its recommendations feel similar to Rdio's, but the interface is a bit lacking. There aren't general recommendations. Instead, you must build a playlist and then you can add a set of recommended songs to the playlist. Of course, there are also radio stations.
Don't get me wrong Gooveshark had possibly the best UI of all the streaming services but it was largely successful because all the content was pirated.
I know. I wish they had been able to go legit. As someone who went to UF (for CS) soon after they closed, I missed having a company like that in the area.
New music Tuesday on Rdio was like Christmas every week. I loved scrolling through the long list of album covers to see what dropped this week. Sampling interesting stuff as I went along.
Beautiful app. Better social/playlist and collection sharing. The only thing they were late on was downloading content for offline. But that eventually came too. RIP.
My gripe with SiriusXM is their pricing model (worse than the cable company). You only buy it when they have a special which makes it 50% off, that is actually a fair price. However in 6 months it will auto-renew at the public rate, snd they hope you won’t notice or you’ll be too lazy to call.
Their call center is horrendous but at least if you threaten to cancel they will magically find another special that’s good for 6 months. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Don’t even get me started with their additional fees that they try and mask as being regulatory/licensing. That’s their freaking business, to license content so they can broadcast it. Just like the airlines, it pisses me off when they try and pass their cost of doing business (actually the whole basis of the product) off as an additional fee.
I will never do business with them again due to these deceptive practices. Hopefully I’m not the only one.
You could replace "SiriusXM" in your comment with "<insert your ISP here>" and it would still be 100% relevant. Fortunately for you, SiriusXM is easily replaceable ... your ISP? Not so much.
My ISP doesn’t have anywhere near as shady marketing practices. Does yours regularly ignore do-not-call and do-not-mail requests? Do they send misleading envelopes that don’t have their brand on the outside? Mine (AT&T) doesn’t.
AT&T is nortourius for this in my area. They will send letters on cardstock with handwritten font, an obscured return address, and a stamp that looks hand placed. No branding until you actually open it.
Well, it's not really fully replaceable in your car without other work. That is, I have SXM in my car radio, integrated in the system. It's the only option. All else is bluetooth or cable plugins, a different interface to manage while I'm driving, and potentially additional costs (data costs, etc.).
Note that BMW and other "lux" makers are now offering deeper integration with phone apps... but they make you pay a subscription to them to enable said functionality. https://www.bmwusa.com/explore/connecteddrive.html describes it; half the features are free but traffic for the nav, integration with mobile apps, other features have an annual cost, around $50 US currently.
And yes, fair point on the 6 month complaint cycle being forced on us by obnoxious subscription approaches.
This is also why I dropped SXM. I got tired of arguing with them on the phone every six months. Especially after the last time where they admitted they over-charged me for three months and gave me three months longer on the existing account balance.
I started shuffling my music library onto USB sticks for my car and haven't looked back.
SiriusXM is more than a music service that competes with Apple Music, Google Play Music, YouTube Music, and Spotify. It is currently the only streaming service where I can get news and a wide range of live event programming via one app and/or the head unit in my car.
Acquiring Pandora could be huge for SiriusXM provided they integrate Pandora into the SiriusXM app and don't raise SiriusXM packages beyond the historic rate of package price increases.
Both services seem like great ideas that have largely gone extinct. Radio that you never lose reception with... streaming music with a user-seeded playlist... just hard to get excited about in 2018. Or 2008 really.
Pandora was a first mover, and they have 70 million monthly users, they are the elephant in the room. As a teen I rather enjoyed certain SirusXM channels while driving in friends cars, and if there was a reasonably priced SirusXM/Pandora bundle, I may be tempted to subscribe. Combined these two companies have 100 million users.
> if there was a reasonably priced SirusXM/Pandora bundle...
The fact that SirusXM wants you to pay extra for their streaming service after you're already spending ~$16/month/radio makes me think that any kind of "reasonably priced" bundle is very unlikely.
>streaming music with a user-seeded playlist... just hard to get excited about in 2018. Or 2008 really.
The only reason why I think that may be the case is because Pandora has been doing it so well for a long time.
I've never managed to get that out of other services. Am I doing things wrong? I'm all ears for suggestions, especially now that Pandora might go through some changes due to acquisition.
Yes. The thing with Youtube is that it only can use one song as a seed, whereas with a Pandora station, you use multiple positive and negative seeds to trim the station to your taste.
It's like comparing weeds growing in your backyard to a carefully trimmed bonsai tree.
However, I'd go to Youtube for hand-picked playlists. There's always a place for that.
Spotify often suggests me songs I already like but haven't listened to on the platform, which is a good sign to me. The suggestions are also just diverse enough for me to discover new stuff.
I don't know Pandora or Youtube (though I have generally bad experience with its suggestions), but am pretty happy with Spotify.
>Spotify often suggests me songs I already like but haven't listened to on the platform
This is exactly why I like Pandora, to the point of it being eerie at times.
Like that one time when I was listening to a Trans Am[1] CD in my car, and thought - well, I've listened to that disk enough times already; let's listen to something new on Pandora -- and it gave me that exact track, while the band never popped up on any of my stations before!
The band was not a station seed, and it's not a band with a huge presence either - I got their CD randomly somewhere.
I know it's a coincidence, but just goes to show how well their algorithms are tuned.
And sadly this isn't even the case. I recently purchased a new car that came with the SiriusXM 3-month trial. We drop reception in the country and in town (among tall buildings). In fact, it drops more often than mobile internet (why doesn't XM have 10s buffer?).
The subscription is also more expensive than Apple Music or Google Play Music and the car comes with Android Auto and CarPlay. How they expect to compete is beyond me. I guess that's why they bought Pandora.
It's odd because some of the first generation Sirius radios touted "DVR" like functionality, which makes it clear that buffering is possible. I would imagine they started to phase out that element of the hardware because of cost (especially since most are bundled with the vehicle)
In the same line of thinking, my navigation apps (Google Maps and Waze) also glitch out when driving through extended length tunnels (under Boston for example). I find this odd given that the app knows my route, and these tunnels are used by millions each year.
I worked on some of those XM radios with the DVR/buffering capability, before the merger.
Really, it was just limited to the amount of storage you had. I think the one I did allowed up to 30 minutes but of course you lost it when you switched channels.
The music is so insanely compressed (the best channels were 32 kbit AAC+) and RAM/Flash is so much cheaper now, it could really be anything you wanted these days.
The satellite signal itself has a bit of time diversity in it (in case one of the birds disappears), like about 1500 mSec worth, as well as terrestrial backup transmitters in most cities (SXM's dirty little secret), so if you really have loss of signal you must be underground for a while.
I lose reception in the forests outside my metro area. Exactly the place I would most want to use it since I have more than a few enjoyable radio stations available to me in the city. When I lose reception on them, I also tend to lose reception on XM. At least enough to be annoying.
Even if it did, that would just delay your signal loss by 10 seconds. It only receives a signal so there's no way it could catch up with what it missed.
A modern service could broadcast music files to your radio and then just schedule those, rather than sending a stream like a FM radio. But that's not how Sirius works now.
Yeah, I got a call from SiriusXM about 60 days after I bought my Accord; Honda gave my contact information and VIN over to them. The person on the phone asked if I liked the 90 day trial and how I'd feel about subscribing.
I told her I never tried it; the car had CarPlay and I plugged in with Spotify right away.
She didn't even bother trying to convince me to use the service. "Oh, yeah, I can see how convenient that is. Let us know if you ever change your mind."
I experience the same thing with Sirius. Going under an overpass means about 2 seconds of audio drop. I don’t know anything about their tech but I always assumed buffering isn’t feasible. I would really hope they’d have implemented it if they could.
There are specific locations where I lose signal extremely consistently. Like the right-turn lane of a road near my office. No bridge, no particularly tall buildings - just a small spot where the radio cuts out every time.
I like Pandora - I don't feel like creating my own playlists and Pandora does a pretty good job of playing music I like after a few thumbs up/downs.
Sometimes though I really want to listen to a particular artist and I use Amazon Music Unlimited for that, but their playlists are not as good (to me) as Pandora.
Pandora used to have a CLI that I would use daily - I could hop into a tab and + or - a song and get a constantly updating playlist. I haven’t used it in years though.
I think this will be a good thing, it shows SiriusXM is going to extend their online presence which currently runs for $10 a month. If this price point starts to includes Pandora it's pretty compelling. Nice channels that are curated with a dj if you like or a well developed algorithmic playlist.
As a business it's good they realize groth won't be coming much from their satellite network.
To be honest, I haven't seriously used Pandora since around 2006 or 2007. It was wonderful for music discovery before the rise of smartphones and streaming services. I've had the Pandora app on my phone for years, but I rarely ever use it. I don't see how it can compete these days. So Sirius XM totally makes sense.
Agreed; I discovered a lot of music through Pandora. In my experience Spotify tends to stagnate on the artist you seed the radio station with, whereas Pandora introduces more variety.
I get the sense that the pendulum is going to start swinging back again soon. The media companies have almost won control again, and they're going to repeat the same mistakes that they made before. The difference now is that they have the internet under fuller control. PirateBay, Grooveshark, Limewire, Napster. Those are the music distribution channels that I grew up with because the media companies squeezed too hard. I'm happy to pay for music, but I'm not happy to pay 5 different subscriptions to listen to a small amount of their libraries. When I buy music, I want it to be mine. I don't want to have access to someone else's music. It's my collection. My impression is that people haven't realized this yet, but they will.
Soundcloud is a zombie - effectively dead. They abandoned their business model so they could grow more, and ceded power to the large record labels.
Try looking for Jay-Z's "The Blueprint" on Spotify.
How many people do you know who have a Deezer account?
SiriusXM's acquisition of Pandora is like Verizon's acquisition of AOL. They're grabbing the long tail of users and platform integrations so that they have the negotiating power with Universal, WB, and Sony to push out the same music that our parents (and now, even their parents) listened to.
I, for one, welcome the consolidation. The harder you lock the sidewalks down, the richer the underground becomes. And the underground is where creativity thrives.
The solutions to illegally acquired music will have different technical implementations, but the same effect (ipv6 feels like it will be necessary in this), and my suspicion is that we'll start heading back that way in the next few years.