2¢ of Lament For Less Than $1 a Month

Pandora, the brilliant streaming radio service that learns your interests and tailors your perfect listening experience based on your feedback, could never be a typical site that coughs up the goods for your eyeballs on the ads. Pandora is simply an application on the web (imagine if Notepad was plastered with ads).

Especially as Pandora moves to more widget-like applications and mobile apps, plastering ads on the small screen just isn't realistic. We want simple playback controls, not an advertising vector. And the last media player to advertise within the application? RealPlayer. The people have spoken, a decade ago.

So as Pandora is little more than a Flash media player and an algorithm, their content is all licensed. Seeing as Pandora is a real, centralized company, it's not hard for the record companies to know where to go a-knocking when they realize they're not getting their cut.

Pandora had staved off a completely subscription-based model for longer than I expected. Hell, I expected them to go under or get bought and gutted, a shell of their former self reformatted by a clueless collective of mainstream label influence. But they've managed to stay true to their roots. The service is as good or better than it ever was.

Music piracy is some parts greed but also a response to lack of alternatives. As the recording industry killed the single and pumped all its advertising into lowest common denominator music, a new path happened to open up at the same time. Jaded by overpriced CDs, forced to purchase entire albums, we sought a new way to find music on our own terms.

The recording industry is still way behind in understanding the new market for music, but pioneers like Pandora and Last.fm are proving they have a clue and are compatible with the future of the music business. So when Pandora, a service you can tailor to play nothing but music you like (and if it doesn't, you aren't using it right) finally moves to a subscription model, people are up in arms. Even if the price, per month, is $0.99. Ninety nine cents. It's time to re-examine our values here, put this shit into perspective, etc.

Have we locked ourselves into a mindset where paying for music at all is wrong? Do we not use iTunes to selectively purchase songs we like at a dollar a pop, for ONE SONG? Do we conflate Pandora with terrestrial radio, where radio doesn't play what we want and has a roughly 3/2 ratio of music to advertising compared to Pandora's next to none? Is there a big difference between $0.99 a month and free a month?

According to Chris Andersen's Free (which I haven't read) the answer is yes. The book claims there's a big difference in people perception of "free" versus even "1 cent" and while that may or may not be true there is obviously a certain attraction to the term "free". Not only does it tell us that using this product will not hit us in the pocketbook, but that there will also be no strings attached, and I think that's a big part of the appeal, the ability to opt out just as easily as we opted in.

Nonetheless, we're on the cutting edge here people. We can overcome this engrained psychology to see that $0.99 is a fantastic deal, a really amazingly good deal. It sure is hell isn't a ripoff. It's a fucking DOLLAR! But some of us are still expressing the same outrage we felt when we were stuck buying CDs to hear one song we liked for $17, and it's just not warranted in this case. The irrationality, courtesy of Lifehacker user comments, starts here.

"This whole greed thing is getting ridiculous."

"yet another reason for illegal downloads... when will they learn..."

"I knew it was to good to last!!! Sooner or later someones gonna get their end in, and mess it up for the rest of us."

"We keep Pandora on all day here at work in one of the common rooms. So we'd use up our 40 hours in a single week. I guess we'll see what happens, but I doubt anyone will step forward each month to pay the $0.99." (mike note: hahaha)

Fortunately the rest of the comments on the page are more reasonable. "One dollar" is a language most of us can appreciate.

The recording industry lost their way, "forcing" many of us to turn to piracy to explore new music and as a middle finger to the oligarchy. Now that they're slowly finding their way into the new millenium, we turn our back on them. Is that fair? Maybe, but we're forgetting the innocent bystander, the artist. The label may have them locked into the unfair contract where they get 1% of total sales, but 1% of zero is zero. Until we create more viable alternatives for music distribution that have more potential for profit than what exists now. Pay what you want is an intriguing model, but better suited for established artists who already have a dedicated following, and let's not forget how they got to that point. Also, I shelled out $10 for the digital distribution of Radiohead's In Rainbows to later get burned when they released it in stores with additional tracks. That left a sour taste in my mouth and I doubt I'm alone.

The point is, Pandora's subscription model was an inevitability. The fact that they can pull off charging a dollar is something we should be grateful for. You can't really go lower than that. Imagine if the cost was $0.50 a month. That's almost insulting to the users, who would just wonder why Pandora couldn't slash it all the way down to zilch. Eventually every site ends up paying the piper. We're fortunate that an above ground site like Pandora will be able to stick around and still offer their service at what is still practically free.