Brief news items and worthwhile reads from around the web:
Pandora and Samsung partner in Australia: We reported Pandora’s agreement with Samsung in New Zealand, putting Pandora’s Internet radio in Samsung Smart TVs. Now the agreement is extended to Pandora’s other non-U.S. country, Australia. (Press Release)
History of in-car entertainment: An informative and (for those of a certain age) memory-lane-evoking review of how listening in the car has changed over decades. A good read as consumers and the music industry grapple with digital dashboards, in-car Internet, and the fate of radio. (Ars Technica)
Profile of a Spotify spammer: this surprisingly charming profile features a man who has uploaded thousands of original tracks to Spotify, and earns decent royalties from the volume. Not really a scam, this fellow records and publishes at least one song a day, and eivdently does it partly for the love of it … and partly for the love of money. (Pando)
Apple employees speak out about why Apple needs Beats: Potentially revealing dirt-flinging here, as past and present Apple employees speak anonymously about Apple executives’ cluelessness regarding streaming music. (BuzzFeed)
The Buzzfeed article is off base because it’s trying to compare Spotify to iTunes Radio while the comparison should be Pandora. Apple has not yet rolled out a streaming on-demand music service. And of course if I was an engineer on iTunes, I would be streaming through something that 1) had all my playlists in it already or 2) in the case of Pandora was trained to my tastes.
I *need* to listen to music when I work; many engineers I know do also. Hard to listen in the background to something you’re actively developing on.
Besides, it’s not the engineers job, it’s the product manager job to develop a compelling product.
But what this really points out is the friction involved in switching from one music platform to another. And it’s in the other platform’s best interest to make sure that you don’t switch, so we’ll continue to see playlists and favorites locked in to services for a long time.