Road to Pandora now goes through Amazon

Pandora is a great music-discovery service, so it's only natural that independent bands would hope to get their music placed on it. Unfortunately for them, Pandora just made that a little harder--and a little more expensive.

As I first saw on the Digital Audio Insider blog a couple weeks ago, Pandora recently changed its music submission process, and is now accepting solicitations only from bands who have a physical CD for sale through Amazon.com. That requires the artist to manufacture a CD with proper album art and bar code, which is much more expensive than creating a bunch of MP3s, and to pay Amazon $29.95 a year to participate in the Amazon Advantage program; Amazon then takes a 55 percent cut of the list price of the CD.

This shouldn't hurt too many artists--serious musicians want their CDs to turn up in a search on the world's largest retailer, and probably have a relationship with Amazon anyway. But you were planning on using CD Baby or another site exclusively, or hoping to save money with an online-only release, don't count on Pandora as a marketing mechanism for your music.

[EarthMatters]

So much for Pandora being inherently about Music. IMHO, this cheapens the whole concept of the Music Genome Project, who will now need to change their mission statement slightly to read as follows: "capture the essence of commercially profitable music at the fundamental level". What's next? Seems to me they'll now add new genes/attributes into the genome to recommend songs based on profitability. This destroys the credibility of the whole genome concept. What a shame.

[El_Segfaulto]

Well I'm going to stop listening to Pandora. What a sad state of affairs.

[wskidm]

As an independent musician, I don't see this as a problem - rather, it simplifies the process from my point of view. Instead of sending a physical package and hoping I hear back sometime soon, I now have an easy place to check on the status of my music request. I am already using CreateSpace, an Amazon subsidiary, for my physical CD manufacturing - a free service, by the way - which gives me an Amazon-sanctioned barcode, and manufacturing on demand, so I don't even have to put up the cost of a CD pressing if my music is accepted. Other bands could easily do the same, and still continue to sell their CDs through CDBaby, if that's what they want to do.

As far as the fee for the Artist Advantage program goes, that's pocket change - so much in the world of music costs, and most of it costs more. Want to get your music on iTunes? Pay a yearly fee to someplace like Tunecore, or a monthly fee to another label. $30 is nothing, and not even required.

[rhetrx]

Pandora isn't the only online game in town -- Magnatune.com will also pick up music by unknown artists. I'm sure a lot of people have gone there to listen to the _Braid_ soundtrack and been pleasantly surprised by the range of music available at the site.

[sadchild]

i just looked at createspace. what a RIPOFF! if you sell a Cd for $10 on amazon through createspace, you only get 45 cents! did universal music come up with this scheme? what a joke!

do the math:

Our Share
Fixed Charge $4.95 / unit*
Share for sales on Amazon.com +45% / sale

that's 4.95+4.50 that goes to createspace!! double-you, tea, EFF?!

You need a way to reduce the volume of submissions. Just because you are independent does not make you good. Seems like raising the bar is a good way to exclude the non-serious band. If you think Amazon's fee structure is too high, you can roll your own and risk sitting on your CDs. I know more than a few indie band member's closet with a box full of unsold CDs.