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I’m starting to appreciate the irony of Pandora’s choice in brand.

Pandora is an online music service that has taken an interesting approach to personalized internet radio. They’ve identified over 400 attributes that capture the essence of a given piece of music. I don’t know exactly how this works, but I imagine some of these attributes must include aspects like tempo or major vs minor keys or which instruments were used to create the music. By mapping out the music genome of hundreds of thousands of songs, Pandora is able to create streaming radio stations tailored to your tastes.

Its a pioneering music service that does an incredible job exposing listeners to obscure yet relevant artists. Unfortunately for music aficionados, Pandora seems to be living up to its namesake.

While Pandora (the webcaster) hasn’t necessarily introduced new evils to the world, by attempting to create a truly innovative digital music service, it is calling attention to evils which already exist.

In this case, Pandora’s box is the music industry and when it was open, out came SoundExchange, the Copyright Royalty Board and international music licensing. Here’s a quick recap of two litigious events which have recently besieged this company:

• SoundExchange is the branch of the RIAA which governs radio. They’ve gotten the Copyright Royalty Board to approve a request to increase the royalty which internet radio companies must pay by 300% - 1200%. This rate hike makes most internet radio business models completely unviable. The only option small companies like Pandora have for survival is to strike deals directly with the labels. This something which would almost certainly entail handing over programming control and ruin precisely that which makes Pandora so great. Major labels will either further line their pockets or gain enough control to promote their top 40 stable of artists.

• The beauty of the internet is that it gives anyone instant global distribution for digital content. As word has spread virally about Pandora, listeners from all over the globe have begun tuning in and creating their own custom radio stations. Unfortunately, due to licensing constraints, Pandora is being forced to block access to their service outside of the US. Knowing how fragmented the international licensing landscape is, it could take years before Pandora is able to open its doors back to foreigners.

At the end of the day, its the small, innovative music services and ultimately music fans everywhere that lose.

Fortunately, the story doesn’t end here. House Representatives Jay Inslee and Donald Manzullo are introducing the Internet Radio Equality Act which if approved would neutralize the rate hike. SaveNetRadio is a newly formed grassroots coalition of artists, listeners and webcasters with the same goals in mind. Pandora is actively working on acquiring the licenses needed to operate outside of the US.

Much like the Greek myth, Pandora finds that in spite of the tragedy, there’s still something left at the very bottom of the box - hope.

Rather than bore you with more of the same rampant speculation that’s inundating the blogosphere, I thought this might be a great point to step back and send you to a funny assessment of the Apple product life cycle I found a few months back.

I figure we’re right smack in between “Apple’s stock surges” and “The haters offer their assessment.”

Everyone pretty much agrees that mobile music is an interesting experience for the discerning consumer. Its been covered pretty well in the blogosphere, and if there’s any doubt, just look at the 42 million iPods sold to date. However, there a couple of aspects of mobile music that I feel doesn’t get enough focus.

Device Convergence
I can’t believe there’re still pundits advocating that for a truly great mobile music device, it needs to be dedicated solely to music. I have an mp3 player (and a digital camera, for that matter), but I loathe carrying them around. It seems like a no brainer to build a device which offers adequate functionality around the holy grail of audio, video and communication. Even Apple, with their fanatic loyalty to the user experience, has finally realized this simply isn’t the case - the iPod Video has made its debut and the iPhone is imminent.

Unfortunately, a decent convergence device is still years away in my opinion. Yes, even the much vaunted iPhone sounds like it will fail to deliver. Kevin Rose leaked that in order to solve the battery problem, the iPhone will contain two batteries - one for the phone and the other dedicated to the mp3 player. This just smacks of one of my early science fair projects. In an attempt to invent something new, I taped together a spoon and a fork, pointing in opposite directions, and called it a spork (I hadn’t discovered Taco Bell yet). C’mon Jobs, any elementary school kid could tape together a cell phone and an iPod and call it a day. Where’s the true innovation here?

Passive Consumption
For some inexplicable reason, it seems like mobile operators are all jumping on the video bandwagon. First there was VCast, followed quickly by Cingular Video. Everywhere you look, there are startups like MobiTV and GoTV, looking for a slice of the action. When did mobile music start to take a back seat to video?

In my mind, listening to music is simply a better fit for a mobile scenario. Video is great for when you’re sitting down for an extended periods of time and can spare the focus. But how often do you really find yourself in this kind of situation? Consider you’re daily commute. You either drive, which should take up your attention if you’re even remotely responsible, or you take the public transit. The latter does provide some time to consume video while sitting at the stop or on the subway/train/bus, but I’d argue that you’re probably also required to do some walking from stop to stop, which again requires your attention.

In every case outlined above, you could be listening to music without losing focus. The commute was just one example. What about when you’re working, studying, shopping or exercising? Music is equally applicable to all of those scenarios, whereas video would be appropriate for none.

The point is, the wireless industry needs to stop buying into the YouTube hype/hysteria and concentrate on building services that consumers would actually uinse.

Next post: The Case against Mobile Music

Let me preface this post by stating that I have nothing but respect for the Zune team. J Allard has performed miracles with the Xbox, and I’ve worked with half of the music store dev team. Juster, Lau, Jubez - all smart guys.

However, the more I learn about Zune, the more disappointed I am. The WiFi radio held so much potential, yet the final product fell so short. Here’re a couple critical components that Redmond needs to be thinking long and hard about.

Asynchronous Buddy Recommendations

Its interesting that you can send a preview of one of your purchased songs to a friend of yours. However, for me personally, most of the friends that I hear about new music from are not in the same time zones as me. Not to mention we’ve all got our own busy schedules, and rarely have time to chat about music. Its simply unrealistic to require your friends to be in the same place and time to share music.

The Zune client ought to support storing of buddy recommendations. Once you enter a WiFi zone, the client uploads your recommendations to a server that holds your buddy’s “recommendations inbox.” The next time your friend comes online, he automatically downloads the preview.

Wireless Push Service

Why, oh why did Microsoft not snap up Last.fm? The WiFi radio makes the device a perfect match. For the less geeky, Last.fm offers plug-ins to your favorite music apps (iTunes, WMP, Winamp, etc) and tracks how often you play different songs. The play counts are used to create a music profile, and your profile is matched up with other profiles that have similar patterns. The service then recommends songs that you haven’t discovered yet, but other people with similar tastes listen to.

The Zune ought to have a Last.fm plug-in for their player, which would upload your play counts automatically any time you entered a WiFi network. As a bonus, if you have an all-you-can-eat subscription, you’ll simultaneously have the latest Last.fm recommended songs uploaded to your player for you to sample.

About a year ago, I happened to catch Steve Burns at the Crocodile Cafe. In case you don’t know who Steve Burns is, he was the goofy host of the popular children’s show Blue’s Clues.

I thought his music was by itself nothing remarkable. However, he had managed to blend it with a myriad of other visual media to create a show that was very unique and extremely engaging. It had seemed somewhat paradoxical at the time that this guy from a stupid kid’s show would demonstrate such artistic sophistication.

I mean, how could someone like this:

Transform himself to this:

I’m about halfway through The Tipping Point right now, and Gladwell is discussing the incredible amount of thought and research that went into the creation of Blue’s Clues. Every single episode was test run at least three times before it was aired even once. Apparently, the show revolutionized the way the industry approached educational programming.

I’m finally now able to reconcile the diametric versions of Steve Burns that I have in my head.