The other thing I love about Pandora is that when you write to their support they write back to you. I’ve sent in a couple of suggestions to them an they always respond quickly and personally. The first time it happened I was caught completely off guard, as I expected the e-mail to get sent straight to null.

In case anyone was curious he said that they don’t currently store any information about the label and that they find this works in the indie artists’ favor. In the sense that people put in popular music they know and get out artists which sound the same, many of which are indie. My thinking was that it would work the same, (i.e. still put in popular music), it just would only play the indie music. It would definitely narrow the scope of what would be played though.

He also said it was a popular request and that a lot of their staff is made up of indie music artist and that they are committed to presenting music that can’t be found on commercial channels. Hopefully, they will get to stay in business and continue to provide such an excellent service.

As you may or may not have noticed I listed several channels on the right hand side to point to my Pandora radio stations. I love Pandora. I use to listen to it a lot at work, but our IT department just blocked all access to Internet radio, so I imagine I won’t be listening nearly as much.

Pandora may be one of the best things for the music industry. If you have never used Pandora before, basically it learns what music you like and then plays similar songs. It allows listeners to find new music that you may actually buy, seems like an ingenious asset for the music industry. This is oppose to typical radio broadcasts which simply play the same songs over and over again until they are stuck in your head and you decide you like them. I suppose in the later case the music industry has a lot more control over what will become popular, but in the former case, I believe, you are much more likely to enjoy what you are listening to enough to buy it (something Pandora also makes easy to do).

Of course the RIAA, their non-profit front group Sound Exchange, and a few judges have decided that Internet Radio needs to be squeezed for cash or die.

It seems everyone who has some relation to Internet radio thinks they are going to shut down and are hoping the rate change will be reconsidered. My original idea was that Pandora could shift to entirely indy music and avoid the charges, but someone posted a comment on their blog stating the same thing. It turns out that Sound Exchange collects revenue for all artists whether they are big label or not. I don’t know if they have an opt out policy or if you can sign your own deals with each artist you want to play, but the default is to pay them no matter who you play. Oh well, I am still going to ask them for a setting that allows me to only play indy music. Assuming they stay in business I don’t want any of the money going to the major labels. Likewise, I would never buy anything from the major labels so it isn’t worth my time to listen to their music.

It seems to me most artists would love to have their music on any station, AM/FM or Internet. Especially something like Pandora, that matches listeners with songs they are likely to enjoy.

By the end of the year the music industry could be at its lowest point in quite a while. The standard radio we have come to know and love (or, in my case, hate) will still be around. There will only be one satellite radio station, and almost every small Internet radio station will be gone. At least the music industry can keep their business model.

BTW, Librarians are hiding something.

One note: Not to completely bash on standard radio, I listen to talk radio all the time, its just every station that played even half decent artist in my area went under so I don’t actually use AM/FM to listen to music.

Well I haven’t been doing much coding lately. Most of what I am particularly interested in requires that I spend a lot of time researching it. Gods of War II also came out, so that will get a hefty amount of my free time. I am also trying to launch a simple blog for my friends independent film company. Hopefully it will be done soon.

One thing I did do was install Edubuntu on my old computer. My father gave me a dual PIII 450 with 512 mb of ram before he moved away. It was his baby and now its mine. For the last couple of years I had it running Suse 8 and used it as a web server and Linux programming box. I almost always connected to it through SSH, but my son would use it at times and play games. Now that I am paying for this web server and have shell access to it I didn’t have much use for it anymore, so I installed Edubuntu on it for my son.

I have used Ubuntu many times of my laptop, I love it and it runs great, except the wireless networking never worked well and it got to the point that I couldn’t stand having to run a script every time my computer hibernated and occasionally log into the router from my desktop to delete the corrupted lease. Hopefully this will be better in Fiesty Fawn.

With Edubuntu I started off with just the live cd because I didn’t want to waste time installing it. My son loved the games and it worked perfectly so I decided to go ahead and install it. A short time later it was ready to go.

I can’t think of a better thing to do with an old computer. This computer would never run a usable windows OS, but with 30 minutes of time I had a completely usable computer set up for my son full of educational software and games. I spent several hours a couple days later downloading patches, configuring themes, downloading codecs, etc, but this was primarily for fun since it didn’t effect my son at all and I don’t actually plan on using the computer. If you have youngins in the house and a crappy computer you couldn’t go wrong with an Edubuntu install.

I will probably put Fiesty Fawn on my primary desktop when it comes out. There is a Linux only app I have been dying to play with.