Pandora to rival Spotify and Apple with new service?

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But how are they going to attract people to Pandora, rather than the aforementioned services many of which have strong exclusivity deals already in place.

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They really are not all that strong. For starters, if an artist is willing to give up 90% of sales on an album for the payout from an exclusivity contract, that generally means the album is terrible or the artist is washed up. Second, there is no such thing as exclusive...all these albums hit torrent sites within hours of release and the only things stopping people from downloading are the law (which is ignored) and desire to support the artist (and who would want to support an artist that tries to force them to install some service they don't want?)

The simple fact is that 99% of the catalogs are the same and it really comes down to how you get people to try it in the first place combined with how well the service actually works. The fact that they have a free option is a big advantage for the first part of that.

As a 43 year old network engineer, totally engrossed in tech, I just don't see the benefit or the desire to pop 10 bucks a month to a streaming service.

XM radio all the way...then download MP3's when that doesn't meet my needs for specific songs/musicians.

99% of the time one can NOT actively stream at work because most businesses are cracking down on that and you're only in your car for a short period of time so using a phone to connect to car and listen to the service (pandory, spotify, etc) seems like a bit of a pain.

I don't listen to radio at home.......perhaps that is where the difference lies but I'd bet a boatload of people pay for satellite radio AND Pandora/Spotify, etc.

I had XM for a couple years, but most of the channels seemed to repeat about every 30 minutes and those that didn't had ads...ads on a paid service! There are only maybe 10 new albums a year that I actually want...at $7-$12 a piece that's less than $10 a month. As for filling out the old catalog, that's $2-$5 per CD, ripped to FLAC and then put away. If the $10 versions of these services were free, I wouldn't use them.