“Pandora offers two services that Apple will likely obviate soon: (1) free randomly selected music on the cloud with interspersed advertisements and (2) paid randomly selected music on the cloud with no advertisements,” Derek C. Cheung writes for Seeking Alpha.
“Apple’s iTunes already has a feature called Genius that recommends songs to users just as Pandora’s Music Genome Project,” Cheung writes. “Unlike Pandora, Genius works only with tracks already owned by the iTunes user and therefore it cannot recommend tracks that the user doesn’t own. The appeal of Pandora is that it allows its users to discover music they are likely to enjoy, based off of their selection of songs and artists they already like.”
“Do you think the imaginative people at Apple can’t put Pandora out of business tomorrow? After the announcement of iCloud at WWDC, people should put two and two together. iCloud will provide every Internet-connected device with access to the world’s entire music library. Then if iCloud comes with the Genius feature, Pandora has no reason to exist. Apple can choose to run ads, too, or it can charge a fee,” Cheung writes. “It gets worse. If iTunes Match is approved by the big four music studios (yes, it’s a big if), people will download pirated music, gain iCloud access to the legitimate files and their only expenditure on music will be $25 per year–paid to Apple.”
“The interesting thing about iCloud is that it is being announced before Apple’s official endorsement of 4G. Apple has an intelligent habit of embracing technologies and formats only after they become generally accepted. Now that Apple has become so successful, this habit has become reflexive–new technologies cannot become generally accepted until Apple embraces them. So even though you see all these 4G advertisements everywhere, the technology has not yet become mainstream, Cheung writes. “Apple’s iCloud push is going to ensure that 4G becomes mainstream. And not only that. Apple will be the first company to make cloud computing mainstream.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: iTunes Match is already approved for the over 18 millions songs in iTunes Store’s catalog. iTunes scans and matches your music with the 18 million songs in the iTunes Store — and automatically stores them in your iCloud library. So chances are your music is already in iCloud.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward Weber” for the heads up.]
pandora was always mostly hype. slacker was better and now spotify is the best
Actually Spotify layout is very Applesque.
This article is pure speculation at this point given that Apple hasn’t even announced streaming of music you own, much less streaming access to the entire iTunes catalog of music you do not own. Could it happen? Yes. Will it happen? Who knows until Apple announces something.
As far as Pandora, vs. Slacker, vs. Spotify; I would argue that Pandora is much more than just hype for people who use it and love it, myself included. I tried Spotify and canceled my paid subscription after a month. It just doesn’t work the way that I consume music. I don’t like making playlists and never have, even within my music player. In iTunes I usually listen to my music on random. Spotify, being very playlist focused, did not appeal to me. Pandora, where I can just create a station based on an artist I like and hear similar music, works exactly the way I want it to. Would I cancel my Pandora subscription if Apple were to announce a competing service? It would depend on whether or not it works with the way that I like to manage and consume my music.
The author is not making a wild speculation but a supposition on what Apple could do based on its available capability. There is a difference between the two terms.
this article is total B.S. how does accessing music i already have in my library compete in any way with Pandora? the point of Pandora is that it is decoupled from what you own, or have to own. until Apple applies it’s Genius functionality to all music and not just my music this is an apples to oranges comparison. fwiw, i’ve heard that iTunes Match isn’t going to stream all music from your library but will require you to download tracks in advance.
Maybe you should read the article before posting. The whole point is that Apple could apply Genius to the entire library and offer a streaming service similar to Pandora.
——RM
so you’re defining the “entire library” as all songs in the world, and not all songs in “my” library? in what reality do the record labels let apple stream me a song that i don’t own? not this one. i’ve seen no mention of this global genius functionality anywhere. so i stand by my point that i see no parallel between iTunes match and pandora.
In theory, Apple could also offer a service similar to Spotify’s. If the labels are agreeable to Spotify streaming their music, wouldn’t they be amenable to Apple branching to a new service exactly similar to the model of Spotify’s? Apple could still maintain their present purchased-focussed service and offer more choices.
i think the Spotify comparison is way more on target and in line with current iTunes functionality. This seems like a more evolutionary path than a jump to Pandora’s model.
I done use Pandora but I think no.
No iTunes is not killing Netflix and nor will iCloud and music matching kill Pandora.
Consumers like choices. I use both Netflix and iTunes for viewing movies. I don’t always wish to pay 6 or 3 or 1 dollar to rent a movie when I can watch as many as I like for 8.
Netflix is fast. Instantly I see the stream. I can decide to watch something else if I am not enjoying it. Impossible in Apples formula.
To wait for the rental to download is painful. To be able to watch it in the time frame is wonderful. The HD choice is goregous and the standard quality of iTunes is also very very good and ues the price is fair usually.
But with Netflix seems I watch alot more and oddly they have sometimes the same titles.
So it’s simple – be a wise shopper.
If pandora and spotify would team up, it would be almost perfect. You could listen to pandora when your playlist becomes mundane and save songs you like directly into pandora.
On another note, all of these services including icloud are going to kill wired devices. I considered buying a nano but realized without access to any streaming content, it would be pretty boring. Only draw is it’s solitary streaming service, FM radio.
Pandora won’t be going away. It is a genius bit of computer programming. Rather than worrying about particular songs, the organization occurs at the style level, and it’s automated. It can be very revealing and it can expand your interests if you take advantage of all if its features.
Even if Apple were to offer certain services that would “obviate” Pandora’s existing offerings it would not render it worthless. Companies like Google or Microsoft would likely seek to buy Pandora to gain leverage against Apple’s growing suite of music and media applications.
” Apple can choose to run ads, too, or it can charge a fee,” Cheung writes.”
Yes, Apple running ads. That sounds truly ridiculous.
I found Pandora to be fairly worthless for my needs. I don’t like the shuffle-esque method and the limit on number of songs that can be skipped. I also found that the matches they produced for some of my favorite acts were terribly off – they had some similarities in their sound, but completely different genre of music. All methods have their pluses and minuses and Pandora’s method just is not my thing.
I finally gave in and signed up for Rdio, a subscription service that seems to have a good catalog, as least as far as my musical taste.
I’m not aware that Pandora still has a skip limit. When I skip a song, it makes me watch an ad. (At least that’s how it works on the Web. Not sure about the mobile app.)
As for the matches being off, Pandora is as good as the amount of work you put into it. The more you use thumbs up/thumbs down on music you love/hate, the better the channel becomes. My favorite channel has become mindblowingly good at playing music that I enjoy.
——RM
Agreed.
Pandora is great and what i really like is the fact i don’t need itunes to use it.
Apple has an intelligent habit of embracing technologies and formats only after they become generally accepted.
Wrong. So everything else he says is suspect.
Who invented & pushed FireWire? Pushed SCSI on desktops? Removed floppies from the original iMacs, and more recently has removed optical drives? The list goes on.
Pandora is smart and grows smarter the more you input which songs you like and dislike. I say this author is misguided in his assessment.
I agree. Pandora, as far as I know, is the only such service which actually analyzes the ingredients of the music itself that make you like it, complex weaves of chord structures, vocal stylings, time signatures, pacing, and other elements that aren’t bound by the arbitrary limits of genre. DRMSSDB complains that Pandora suggest songs by acts which may sound similar to what he has seeded, but which are of the wrong genres. But that’s precisely the point! Pandora is about helping you find music that you wouldn’t discover just browsing the same categories with which you are already familiar. It leads you further into the world of music and broadens your appreciation… if you let it! That’s where the others, like Apple’s Genius fail. They associate songs more by popularity with others of supposedly similar tastes, but are far more likely to be confined by what’s contemporary, and not see the inherent similarities between, say, a song by The Shins, and a Beatles tune. Anyone who’s been playing with Pandora since its beginnings knows it’s about exploring, not about being fed your predetermined playlists or what other people are buying right now who have something in common with you… Pandora may not ultimately survive on its own merits as a business model, but it won’t be iCloud or Genius taking it down, in my opinion.
wedding dj’s
I LOVED LaLa? Dam shame it no longer exists. Maybe Apple will repurpose in iCloud.