Pandora

Don't let losses fool you: Sirius XM has promise

Sirius XM has suffered through yet another losing quarter. Last week, the satellite radio company reported a net loss of $236.6 million for the first three months of the year.

Although it posted a tough first quarter, CEO Mel Karmazin expressed optimism. Sales grew to $587 million from $270.4 million a year prior, he noted. His company's operating costs dropped 23 percent year over year. And there is more evidence than ever that Sirius XM is slowly inching its way toward profitability, he said in a statement.

Not everyone is impressed. Fellow CNET Blog Network member Steve Guttenberg wrote that Sirius XM is "sticking it" to subscribers. He believes that customers aren't getting enough for what they're paying.

I understand his point. As a Sirius XM subscriber, I wasn't pleased to hear recently that it was raising prices. But that doesn't taint my evaluation of the service. For me, the "Sirius Everything plus the best of XM" package is worth $16.99 per month.… Read more

Sourcetone picks tunes for your mood

A friend pointed me to Sourcetone Interactive Radio, which offers a sort of New Age twist on Pandora. Sourcetone's main gimmick is a colorful mood wheel--select your mood by clicking on the wheel, and the service will begin streaming appropriate music.

There's a lot of verbiage on the site about how Sourcetone is basing its selections on scientific research, including some conducted by a team at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, but so far there's only one published research paper on the site. The scientific angle is not particularly interesting to me--any music fan knows that … Read more

Reciva adds Pandora to 10 Wi-Fi radios

When we get a Wi-Fi radio in for review and find that it uses the Reciva database to offer up Internet radio stations, it's usually a good sign. Reciva's database of stations is nearly comprehensive and we always appreciate that you can manage the thousands of available stations using Reciva's Web site.

In addition to traditional Internet radio stations, Reciva announced Monday that it's adding Pandora support for 10 devices, including Wi-Fi radios from C Crane, Grace Digital, Livio, Sonoro audio, and Tangent Audio.

While some of the radios listed already included Pandora support (such as … Read more

Livio Radio puts Pandora in a box

The new Livio Radio certainly isn't the first Wi-Fi radio to feature Pandora access--the Squeezebox Boom and the Grace GDI-IR2000 both offer the functionality--but it's certainly the first model seemingly designed around the streaming Internet music service.

With a standard tabletop radio design, the Livio gives you full access to Pandora, and also makes it easy to interact with the service by putting "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons on the front panel and the remote. The Livio can connect to your home network using either the integrated Wi-Fi or the Ethernet port around … Read more

SlotRadio could thrive with more eclectic music

I'll readily admit that I'm not in the target audience for the new SlotRadio MP3 player from SanDisk, which became available last week.

The $99 device comes with a microSD card containing 1,000 songs, selected by Billboard editors from top-charting radio hits of the last 40 years or so, arranged in seven playlists--rock, country, hip-hop, and four others.

You can't edit or rearrange the playlists, you can't move the songs to your computer or any other device, and the only way to get new songs is by buying new 1,000-song cards for $39.99 … Read more

Smule CEO: iPhone is the only game in town

The folks at Smule, Pandora, Nokia, and BlueRun Ventures may not agree on everything, but during a Thursday night panel discussion on the business of mobile applications, their attention centered on a single device time and time again: the iPhone.

From the ease of the iPhone's paint-by-numbers SDK to its extremely accessible on-phone App Store and unified hardware and software package, the conversation on all sides of the table both challenged and defended claims of the iPhone's hegemony.

Pandora's Chief Technical Officer, Tom Conrad, credited iPhone's App Store with the success of Pandora's free music discovery … Read more

What's the real cost of free music?

SpiralFrog met its end just days ago, and already, operators of other ad-supported music services are rushing to put distance between their business models and that of the doomed site.

"The concept was good, but the management, board (not all), and execution were poor," wrote Robin Kent, the former CEO of SpiralFrog who went to work as an adviser to Qtrax, one of SpiralFrog's competitors. "It was obvious to anyone...it wouldn't survive."

What might encourage supporters to jump to the defense of ad-supported music services, which don't charge users to listen to … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 932: iPhone gets cheap Nokia phone features

The 3.0 version of the iPhone firmware is coming in the summer and will feature copy and paste, MMS, search, and more. All things a cheap Nokia phone can do now, but hey, the iPhone couldn't and now it can. So there. We also review the sleek new Dell Adamo and take Australia to task for a fine for hyperlinks.

Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 932

Live blog: iPhone OS 3.0 preview http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10197216-37.html http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/03/16/the-iphone-os-30-announcement-scorecard/

Hands-on with the Dell Adamo http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10197525-1.html … Read more

Vudu adds Pandora to its bag of media tricks

Pandora's free online music service is coming to the Vudu set-top box.

Vudu has announced the availability of "immediate access" to the Pandora service for users of its media-on-demand box. Vudu's iteration will allow on-screen access to the music service (as shown above), as well as the ability to toggle between multiple Pandora accounts (so several family members in a given household can access their individual personalized stations, for instance). Pandora joins the recent addition of YouTube, Picasa, and Flickr to Vudu's movie box.

Vudu is pledging to open its Rich Internet Application platform to … Read more

What I love about MySpace Music

As someone who spends most of his day on the computer, I need to do everything I can to keep myself entertained. Sometimes, that manifests itself in games and other times I find entertainment on the Web through online music services.

For years, I used Pandora, the song-discovery service powered by the Music Genome Project, and loved every minute of it. But over the past couple months, things have changed and I've quickly started to dedicate all my music time to MySpace Music.

The reasons why are numerous, but I should first note that I've got some issue with the service. First off, it's inundated with ads, and no matter where you go, you can bet that any MySpace Music page will be flanked by blinking advertisements or other unwelcome additions that detract somewhat from an otherwise outstanding service.

I should also mention that MySpace Music doesn't allow its users to share playlists, which is a bit annoying. You also can't have it "on-the-go" nearly as easily as you can with a site like Pandora, which offers a mobile app for those who want to hear music while away from their computer.

Other than that, though, I simply love MySpace Music. It's the single reason why my love affair with Pandora is over and it's my first destination when I want to listen to music while I work. Simply put, it's outstanding.

Songs, songs, songs As much as I enjoy the discovery engine on Pandora, I'd much rather have the option to build my own playlist of songs and listen to only those titles I want to hear. That's a luxury I really don't have on Pandora, but it's the backbone of what makes MySpace Music great.

MySpace Music currently offers millions (yes, millions) of songs from artists ranging from the popular, like Britney Spears and Bruce Springsteen, to the obscure, like Deerhunter. And unlike most services in the space… Read more