Maybe you’ve already heard of the Pandora Service. If not, I will tell you something about it.
You discovered a new artist and you really like his sound. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just enter his name or a songtitle to find other music that sounds like it?
Thats exactly what Pandora does. It analyses the music of the artist you’ve entered and gives you back other music, that is like the music of the artist. And it really works!
This is a really cool service, but unfortunately it’s not free of charge. On one side I can understand it because of the music industry but on the other side I have to ask myself why there are so many free radio station that stream out todays hits.
Maybe they’ll release their algorithm for free so that someone can code an open source equivalent to this
I think the costs are there because you can listen to the music. You can also listen to webradios, thats true, but i think Pandora has a huge selection of files.
And btw: I doubt that there are many webradios with licensed content.
Look at Digitally Imported. They haven’t many commercials (1 minute on 1 hour) but they have about 20 channels with total about 20′000 to 60′000 listeners. How can they pay this? They are licenced for sure. And I doubt there are much people that pay for the premium stream…
And you have to remember that the Pandora project is a research project…