Pandora, the U.S.’s favorite streaming music service, just launched two new products, Pandora for Sprint and Pandora for Sonos. → Read More
Music streaming service Pandora has had its ups and downs over the last two years since launching. People love to listen to their personalized radio stations that get more and more tailored as you tell it what you like and don’t like. But recent changes to the royalty rates they must pay the RIAA for playing music over the Internet will be going up drastically in the coming years. And licensing complications have led them to block out all non-U.S. listeners. Tonight, however, Pandora and its users are celebrating. At a 7 pm meeting for press at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, they just announced a bunch of new features: Pandora For Sprint In their first mobile deal, Pandora is offering to stream radio stations on a number of Sprint handsets via pre-installed or downloaded software (take your Sprint phone browser to Pandora.com and you will be prompted to download the client). This is free for 30 days. After that you must have a Pandora premium account, which costs $3/month (this also removes ads from Pandora.com when you listen there). Pandora For Sonos Sonos now supports Pandora, so you can stream Pandora music through your normal home sound system. Sonos has been aggressive about getting deals done with partners. They launched with Rhapsody last year, and announced support for Microsoft DRM earlier this year – meaning music from AOL Music Now, MTV Networks’ URGE, Napster, Wal-Mart, Yahoo! Music and the Zune Marketplace now play on Sonos devices. The State of Pandora Pandora has also redesigned its website to better integrate the listening and community features. The company says they now have 6.9 million registered listeners who have played 4.7 billion songs and voted up or down half a billion times. This makes them, they say, the third largest Internet radio station in the world. They play 94% of their entire catalog every day, so they are dipping far into the long tail of music. Pandora also invited some of their heaviest users to the event tonight. On average, they say, their heavy users listen to Pandora for 18 hours/week. → Read More
Later today Sonos will announce that their home music devices will now support Microsoft DRM’d music. That means music from AOL Music Now, MTV Networks’ URGE, Napster, Wal-Mart, Yahoo! Music and the Zune Marketplace will all play on the Sonos devices. Users have been able to play music from Rhapsody since September – meaning that all major music services except iTunes are now supported to some degree. Sonos users must upgrade to v 2.1 of the software, available here. Apple still has such a stranglehold on the digital music industry that it’s unclear this will drive much additional usage. And while Sonos will play downloads from the music services, they will only play streaming music from Rhapsody subscribers. So if you are a Sonos user, you’re best bet is to make sure your downloaded music is in the MP3 format, or use the Rhapsody subscription service if that’s your cup of tea. Things got a little simpler in the DRM world today, but it is our opinion that the days of being forced to buy protected music will soon be over. In the meantime, we do not recommend buying DRM’d downloads from any service. Either buy the CD and rip it, as Bill Gates recommends, or join one of the subscription services. We won’t talk about BitTorrent and AllofMP3 ’cause our lawyer told us to stop. Our previous coverage of Sonos is here. → Read More
The word “audiophile” gets bandied about so much that it seems in danger of losing its true meaning as a descriptor for a grade of products that is of such high quality that most of us can’t hope to afford then. But this year saw quite a few items blurring the line between audiophile and consumer audio, as higher-end components are finding their ways into almost-affordable products. The eight deliciously designed audio toys below are my favorites of 2006, and while they’re not exactly cheap, you don’t have to be Paris Hilton to get one in your holiday stocking this year. → Read More
SanDisk, makers of the Sansa players, and RealNetworks, makers of the Rhapsody music store, are teaming up together to ensure their hardware and content work seamlessly together. Before now, the only player to work bundled with a single music store was the Apple iPod. It was this synergy, among various other things, that allows the iPod to become the de-facto champ of portable music players and online music stores. By combining Sansa and Rhapsody, SanDisk and Real are trying to make sure their customers get a complete “experience” to rival the iPod/iTunes “experience”. This is a similar tactic that Microsoft is taking with its Zune players, making it not play protected music. At first we thought the Zune’s non-support for PlaysForSure was a typo, but they are most likely going to bundle their Zunes only with their Zune Marketplace music content, ensuring the 1-to-1 relationship that iPod and iTunes has. In addition, Rhapsody has also partnered with Sonos, allowing them to provide an integrated music solution for the living room as well. We’ll see if RealNetwork’s reversal of their old tactic of universal playability will have any effect on the iPod + iTunes tsunami. IPod, TheyPod: Rivals Imitate Apple’s Success [WSJ] → Read More
Streaming music and video could finally invade the living rooms of mainstream America next year. With Apple’s iTV vaporware device coming to light early, it sort of sets the stage for all kinds of digital fun. → Read More
Sonos today announced that the latest version of their home music devices now support streaming music from Rhapsody. We have previously written about Sonos and a couple of weeks ago we spent some time with the two founders of the company talking about the future direction of the company, what their plans are and getting insight into this latest release. As we previously mentioned, Sonos is one of the easiest and best hardware devices we have seen that mix digital music, net connectivity and good quality sound. The new integration with Rhapsody (which is a product of Real Networks) gives users the ability to stream any of the 2 million+ songs and 100+ ad-free radio stations right onto their Sonos device. Traditionally, Sonos would crawl all your local network shares and index your music – but now with Rhapsody you can just pick any song and play it without the need for local storage. In terms of pricing, every Sonos 2.0 user will be able to try out the service free for 30 days, after which they must pay 9.99 for the unlimited service from Rhapsody. Since being founded in early 2002 and launching in January of 2005, Sonos has been growing from strenght-to-strength. The product currently sells in over 25 countries and they have offices in the Netherlands and Boston. They currently have 500 retail locations in the US. The UK is their second largest market. Other features from the new Sonos include: Mac, Linux and PC users can now enjoy Rhapsody in every room. Discover new music with Rhapsody’s Artist Radio. Built-in music charts. Create an instant music library. → Read More
I’ve spent the weekend setting up and using a Sonos music system in my house. Sonos sells hardware that connects to your home network to play digital music and internet radio stations (and also Rhapsody) around your house. Each piece of hardware is a separate zone, so different music can be played in different areas of your house, all controlled by a single wireless hand held device. It’s a lot of hardware – two ZP80s, a ZP100 (plus speakers) and a controller, but my house is now completely unwired for music, and I’m about as happy as a person can be. This stuff is expensive, but amazingly simple to set up and use. You plug any one of the main units into a router, install software on your PC or Mac, and then plug other units in around the house where you want to play music. Point it to your music collection on your network, or use Rhapsody or the pre-selected internet radio stations. The ZP80 units are smaller and need to be plugged into some sort of amplified device – stereo system, computer, etc. The ZP100 units have an amplifier built in and can be plugged directly into speakers. These are all interchangeable, you can use a ZP100 in one room, a ZP80 in another (which is what I have done). They are also modular, so you can add new components over time. The controller works a lot like an iPod and has two features I’m using heavily. The first is the ability to queue up songs on the fly (add songs to the queue while you are listening to another). The second are the genre-specific radio stations built into the software – I’ve been listening to Los Angeles based KROQ all weekend. If you are a music junkie, this is for you. Total setup time: 25 minutes. We’ll be testing out more gadgets at TechCrunch in the near future. → Read More
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