gHacks technology news » finetune http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:26:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Pandora adds commercials http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/10/pandora-adds-commercials/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/10/pandora-adds-commercials/#comments Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:07:14 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/10/pandora-adds-commercials/ Pandora streams music over the internet which is related to a artist or song that you have entered at the beginning. The service is great to find new artists that make a similar kind of music than artists that you like to listen to. The service was completely free until now.

They have decided to add advertisement to their service. According to Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad about 10% of the users are receiving a nine second advertisement once a day. This looks like testing the waters for me. If few users complain about the ads they might introduce this to all listeners and probably even increase the amount of ads that are displayed each day.

I personally think that it is not such a big problem if you compare it to terrestrial radio stations for instance. It could become one if they would decided to increase the advertisements. One should also consider that websites that offer such services have to generate money somehow to be able to pay the bills for servers, bandwidth and service.

A alternative would be finetune.com which can also be used to get new suggestions.

What is your opinion on the matter ?

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/10/pandora-adds-commercials/feed/ 3 FineTune a Pandora like Music website http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/23/finetune-a-pandora-like-music-website/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/23/finetune-a-pandora-like-music-website/#comments Sat, 23 Dec 2006 14:07:23 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/12/23/finetune-a-pandora-like-music-website/ If you do now Pandora you feel right at home when entering the FineTune website. Guests may use only part of the streaming radio services offered at the website but it is good enough for a rough overview of what FineTune has to offer. Just enter an artists name in the search field and FineTune will search for the artist that you have entered and related artists and start with the playback of songs that the search found.

The search reveals many albums of the artist as well and you can either add selected songs to a playlist that you can create after you registered an account or listen to the songs for 30 seconds. Adding playlists is rather easy. You click on the + symbol in front of the songs and it is added automatically to your playlist. There is a limit of three songs per artist and you need to create a complete playlist of 45 tracks to be able to listen to it.

This is a severe limitation of course but it seems that they have to comply with some restrictions to be able to offer the service at all. If you have added at least songs from three artists you may click the I’m lazy button which adds suggested songs automatically to your playlist to fill it.

Once it is filled to the brim you may listen to it. Once a playlist has been created it becomes public and everyone may listen to it and write comments about it. Instead of creating your own playlists you may also listen to playlists created by other members or so called stations which are playlists created by the finetune team.

You may even add playlists into your blog or myspace, code is provided to do so. I personally like this even more than Pandora but that is more a matter of taste.

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