Music Online

As technology advances, music is becoming more accessible to everyone. The Internet is at the forefront of music technology breakthroughs. New websites and programs have brought music to millions of people with as little as one click.
The three most popular music services are based on three different business and technology models. Each has a different set of price and availability options, but all have over ten million visitors and users each year.
With eighty million users, Pandora Internet Radio is the most popular out of the top three. Pandora is run by an automated selection program called “The Music Genome Project” that works based on user-input. Users create new stations based on specific songs, artists, and genres. Pandora uses two thousand different traits to help pick out each song to play on the user created station. Pandora has two pricing options available: free and 99 cents per month.

Listening for free with Pandora has limitations: song skips are limited and you cannot rewind or fast forward through songs. There are also advertisements distributed randomly between songs. Premium, or paying, listeners may bypass the skip limit and all advertisements. This service is only available in the United States and enforces this by banning all international I.P. addresses.
Last.fm is a web-based music listening service that boasts a user-base of thirty million. Users seek out the program for new music rather than familiar tunes. “I use Last.fm because it always finds what I’m looking for, even when I don’t know what I’m looking for,” said Muzammil Khan.

Current Last.fm users have problems with the loading speed of songs. Songs are sometimes stuck loading for several minutes, while some songs never load at all.
Last.fm used to pick songs for the user is named “Audioscrobbler.” It extracts data from user’s Internet history, personal computer library, and any connectable mobile devices to personalize the listening experience.
The program then uses the information it uncovers to select songs it believes match your interests. The program is a hybrid of both the Spotify user-selection system and the Internet radio approach provided by Pandora.
The free version of Last.fm is only available in United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Users in other countries are offered a 50 track free trial. Once the trial expires, they are prompted to subscribe to Last.fm’s premium service for about five dollars a month.
Spotify is the newest music provider to the United States, with its most current stable release debuting on October 14. Spotify is a streaming music experience that is monitored by digital rights management to protect its content. The songs cannot be downloaded onto a computer without infringing the terms of use. The listening experience is controlled completely by the user. This client boasts a large library of music that any user can browse and buffer songs to hear. Songs can be “starred” and sorted into playlists.

Spotify has a free service, but it is riddled with advertisements between songs and on the interface. With Spotify premium, users are awarded with additional listening hours, a no advertisement experience, and the fastest buffering rate out of all the music services currently available for five dollars a month. This service is available in several different countries, including: the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden.
Social media has started to integrate within Spotify. There are now options to show songs to friends through websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Spotify also integrates a feature called “scrobbling” from another music website called Last.fm.
“Scrobbling” is a logging technology that marks how many and which songs are listened to by the user on social media websites, first used by Last.fm. All three of these services are wildly popular and command the music scene on the Internet. Many users have complaints about each service, citing annoying advertisements and high premium costs. The cheapest premium service of the three, Pandora, has song selection problems with both premium and free versions.
“I’ve had pop songs play on techno stations. It makes no sense,” said Asa Nienstadt, a Pandora user. “I still love Pandora more than any other service. It’s a great way to find new music on accident.”

Pandora has received complaints about intrusive advertisements, which have caused some users to switch over to other programs. “The advertisements were too frequent and too loud. I switched to Spotify because it’s trendy,” said Masha Soldatenkova.
Spotify attracts it’s users with the fully customizable playlists and integrated social media options. “It’s like iTunes but free,” said Cody Becker.
Spotify’s selection is sparse, featuring mostly mainstream pop and new releases. Many users are not happy with the smaller amount of music genres available.
“I stopped using Spotify because it didn’t have the music I wanted, I had to install a program, and it had advertisements,” said Josh Hampton. The advertisements on Spotify, while less frequent than Pandora’s, are more intrusive and sometimes take over the entire screen.
There is one major issue with all three of these music providers. “I think the downfall of all [three] of those services is that you have to have [an] Internet connection,” said Vincent Sarikey, “I’d rather just download.”


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News article by MR