Pandora Radio
Music Genome Project is the father of Pandora radio and automated music recommendation program that allows users to select a song or an artist they love before the system can provide similar if not the exact requested results. 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 is very high with a lot of criteria taken into consideration for the choice of the next play. The program attributes fall under several categories known as the focus traits, and it suffices to say that there are more than 2,000 such traits 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. 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. Pandora radio like may other stations cannot run without the advertising time they sell to businesses.
The recent regulations passed by the Copyright Royalty Board forced Pandora radio to limit its broadcasting to the United States only, and while the terrestrial radios remain unaffected by the rules, licensing guarantees and fees, online broadcasters have very few possibilities to continue their activities. Europeans trying to access Pandora Radio receive a message with an explanation that their Euro-IP is barred and that usage of the service has been restricted to the United States only. Without this measure, Pandora Radio would have collapsed because of 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 forbids more than six skips per hour. And last but not least when listening to Pandora radio, remember that it does not play-on-demand but rather provides similar music of the kind required by the user. The freedom the user has under the circumstances is to sample songs from a selected artist’s page.
