Pandora Finds Its Funny Bone

Last August I wrote about Pandora adding genres to its service, praising its attempt to innovate despite being the leader in its market. Luckily for its music-loving users, Pandora has continued adding to its site in 2011.

Earlier this week Pandora added comedy genres to their list of stations, letting users add stand-up routines and sketches from different decades and styles. There's a pretty good mix of stations, including a Working Class Comedy genre if you like the Blue Collar Comedy Tour style, or Golden Oldies if you fancy yourself more of a Bob Newhart person.

As with the music stations, users can like or dislike a comedy sketch with a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" voting system. Pandora's thumb-voting has been popular, and the site reported on Monday that they surpassed 10 billion thumbs.

Most people seem to like the new comedy stations, and its good to see Pandora thinking outside of the box.

Not Just A Flash In The Pan(dora)

On August 29th the music-streaming site Pandora will turn 5, which is quite the achievement in Internet years. It was launched when YouTube was only six months old, a year before Twitter even hit the market, and way before Facebook was anywhere near the online juggernaut it is today.

Pandora has been one of the quieter online success stories over the years. Despite little press coverage, the site has not only seen near-steady growth in 2010 but has become a cultural icon and one of the first things people think of when they think of online music.

Pandora's format hasn't really gone under any drastic changes over the years other than offering premium paid services. However, they recently announced the launch of genre-based stations that would focus on a wider range of music instead of a band or song.

Is this a game-changing innovation? Probably not, but with more and more music-streaming sites popping up, it's important that existing sites continue to innovate.

Pandora Adds Ads

While listening to my Beatles station today on Pandora, a short commercial for "Lie To Me," a new FOX show premiering tomorrow, popped up in between songs.

This was the first time I had seen this kind of advertising on Pandora. It was only about 10 seconds long, clean, and didn't really annoy me at all. I think this format works and it has been suggested that it would work with Twitter. In between every 15 Tweets, Twitter could insert small clean ads that relate to what your profile is about or the keywords within your Tweets. What do you think?

Random Social Media Thoughts

A collection of my social media thoughts for the day:

- It is weird to think that we are engaged in the first election since YouTube's creation. It has been heavily utilized by most campaigns. Most video hits: probably Obama. Most YouTube comments: definitely Ron Paul. For a while it was almost impossible to look at any popular video without a Ron Paul supporter commenting on it.

- Facebook is going the way of MySpam...oops, I mean MySpace. Too many useless applications and now comes a complete revamp of the website along with a slew of spam. I see the temptation for Facebook to converge and become everything social media, but instead I wish they would follow the KISS principle (keep it simple stupid, as in we didn't really need all the 3rd party apps and all that junk).

- Another victim of spam - YouTube. I remember not too long ago when I would check the daily top videos on YouTube and find a collection of unique, creative, and often hilarious videos. Check the most viewed videos today and you will find about 50% of the titles aren't in English, a handful of videos are Japanese cartoons, and the rest are spam or ads for websites. Maybe 10 videos out of the top 100 are now worth watching.

- Pandora might get shut down soon. They are paying outrageous royalties and can't get out of the red. If they do get shut down by the RIAA, expect an uproar from the over 1 million daily users of Pandora.

- Apple still needs to get a better control of the App Store. Only a few applications are released every week and the ones that get publicized aren't that great. Btw, who gave the clearance for the I am Rich application?

- Something will replace MySpace as a music site soon. Currently, MySpace is repeatedly being pigeonholed as a site for 3 different types of people: musicians, spammers, and child predators. Whether it is true or not, it is repeated frequently enough to the point where people will believe it to be true. My prediction for MySpace's music predecessor? Modlife. I will give a review of the website later this week.

Closing Pandora's Box

A sad day may be approaching for online music lovers. Pandora may soon be shutting down its website and music service due to increased royalty fees.

"The Copyright Royalty Board's decision raised a then-current 8/100 of a cent per song per listener to 19/100 of a cent under the same conditions in 2010."

This rate hike is a major blow to Pandora, which is currently losing money due to royalty fees. Of the $25 million of revenue that they bring in this year, 70% will go to royalty fees.

The death of my favorite App from the AppStore might be approaching soon. Will this further anger music fans? Of course. Pandora has over 1 million daily users, including me. I have spent at least $20 on music after hearing it first on Pandora. Hopefully, the CRB comes to its senses before it is too late...

Read the full article on Pandora here.