Discover New Music from Pandora on Your Chumby®

New Content Keeps Music Fans Engaged with Pandora Radio, Music Videos from Avot Media and News Headlines from Rolling Stone

SAN DIEGO—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Chumby is now giving music fans a new way to stay constantly connected to the music of their favorite artists, while also introducing them to new music they’ll love. All chumby players can now tune into personalized radio stations from Pandora accounts and have Pandora set as the audio source for custom alarm clocks. Additionally, chumby users will now be able to search and view music videos and more from a music video widget powered by tipMotion from Avot Media, Inc., and receive up-to-the-minute music news and images from RollingStone.com, all without logging onto a computer.

“We know music is a big part of people’s lives and fans want to have always-on, always-fresh access to their favorite artists,” said Stephen Tomlin, CEO of chumby. “A benefit of buying a chumby is that the product is always improving as we add new content and features through automatic upgrades. Now chumbys can be used as radios for the Pandora service at no charge, so whether you bought your chumby months ago or today – you win.”

Pandora is an Internet radio service that is now accessible through chumby. When you indicate a song or artist that you enjoy, Pandora responds by playing selections that are musically similar. You can provide feedback on the individual song choices to further refine the playlist to suit your taste. Your chumby can also wake you with your favorite Pandora station and let you listen to “personalized” radio all day.

“Chumby’s innovative connected media player is a natural fit for Pandora,” said Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora. “With Pandora now available on chumby, our listeners have even more ways to hear their favorite artists and discover new music.”

Also available on chumby are music videos powered by Avot Media, a video formatting and streaming solution provider. Now chumby users can watch the most popular music videos each week, and search for thousands of popular music, entertainment, news, and sports videos on the most popular search engines at the touch of a button.

Chumby music fans will also be able to receive the latest news and images of their favorite bands through updates from RollingStone.com. In addition, Wenner Media, Inc., publishers of RollingStone.com, will also showcase content from other Wenner publications such as UsMagazine.com.

The addition of music content from Pandora, music video streaming from Avot Media and music news updates from Wenner Media complements the strong music and podcast offerings already on chumby, including thousands of AOL SHOUTcast stations, music news from MTV and VH1, and dozens of great streaming stations on Radio Free Chumby.

The Price: $200 for 25-station 4GB, and $250 for the 40-station 8GB unit. The free service is ad-supported and allows six skips per hour, while the premium service costs about $10/month and is ad-free, offers unlimited skips and the ability to save songs to the device.

The Verdict: The Slacker G2 looks a million times better than its first-gen sibling. The older player was bigger and thicker than a deck of cards, with poorly placed buttons and a capacitive touch strip that felt somewhat cheap. The G2 trims the fat from the device, leaving a screen just big enough to show album art, and controls that are far more intuitive than its predecessor. The 2.4" display is clear, text is very readable, menus are simple and it's about as tall and thick as an iPod dock (but much lighter), a good size for the hand.

For this portable Pandora-style player to succeed, it needs two things. The first thing is, it needs a great selection of songs, tailored to the user's tastes. In this respect, it's awesome—even pre-programmed stations (think satellite radio rather than Pandora) have a wide ranging and thoughtful collection of artists, and stick mostly to singles or fan favorites so you don't get many strange deep cuts. Custom built stations (which you have to create in the web player) are even better. In both cases, you can favorite or ban song suggestions that you don't like, but if you design a station with more than 200 songs, you won't get any outside suggestions (though you probably no longer count as a true "slacker").

The other thing the G2 absolutely needs is a solid connection for refreshing stations. Sadly, this is where it falls short. A full refresh took almost two hours; stations took at least 10 or 15 minutes apiece to download. Adding a custom station for the first time took forever, and so did refreshing stations that I listened to often, favoriting and banning many songs. You can't refresh one station at a time—only all stations at once—and you can't create stations directly on the device either. I'd love to see these two things in a firmware update. Slacker may have shown us its more viable future in smartphone software with its recent BlackBerry announcement. Still, with some software tweaks and better networking, the company could make the G2 a decent alternative for those who fear convergence. [Slacker]

In other words, a computer or other wireless device that taps into the Vi-Fi system would select one base station at a time as an anchor. Using a complex algorithm, the system will calculate the probability that a packet received by an auxiliary base station was not received by the anchor. If the probability is high, the auxiliary will relay the packet to the anchor as a backup.

Microsoft hopes that their research will lead to the first truly reliable Wi-Fi system for vehicles, and recent tests conducted on their campus have been extremely successful. The next step is to scale up the project around the campus, but how or when a Vi-Fi system could be implemented in the real world has not been determined. Of course, one major hurdle would have to be that a serious municipal Wi-Fi infrastructure would be required to get the project off the ground. [SeattlePi via DailyTech via Newlaunches]

The Price: $199.

The Verdict: I actually like this thing a lot despite its laundry list of flaws—it's a bread-and-butter gadget that mostly works as advertised. It's got more radio stations than you could possibly ever listen to, from a good portion of the United Nations and organized into a bunch of different genres. Whether or not you want it basically comes down to how much you love radio, and if having thousands of stations on your alarm clock makes you tingly.

Here's what I dug: You can use any radio station (internet or otherwise) as your alarm. Bookmarks for your favorites, a necessity. The stations are about as well organized as you can hope for in cataloging thousands of them, and you can sort them by genre or location. Setup is simple, even without instructions. The sound and size aren't bad, though the bass could be a bit punchier. And I just like the concept of the thing—the core internet radio functionality works really well, above all.

Not groovy: The screen and UI are ugly, straight out of the early '90s. A significant issue is that the Wi-Fi receiver is weak—my DD-WRT router blasts the signal at 85mW, and on the other side of my apartment (which is by no means cavernous) two rooms away, I only got two bars. In a larger pad, this will be a problem. It lost service occasionally, requiring a reboot. And I never could get it to sync up with Windows Media Player, even though it saw my computer, and my computer saw it. Given these issues, $199 is just way too much, as much as I like this thing's soul. [Aluratek]

Under Section 114(g)(3) of the Copyright Act, it's only allowed to use the money for

(A) the administration of the collection, distribution, and calculation of the royalties;

(B) the settlement of disputes relating to the collection and calculation of the royalties; and

(C) the licensing and enforcement of rights with respect to the making of ephemeral recordings and performances subject to licensing under section 112 and this section, including those incurred in participating in negotiations or arbitration proceedings under section 112 and this section, except that all costs incurred relating to the section 112 ephemeral recordings right may only be deducted from the royalties received pursuant to section 112.

Despite my lack of a law degree, I'm pretty sure none of musicFIRST's activities are listed in those provisions. But organizations connected to the music industry specialize in creative legal interpretations (they represent artists after all), so I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for that. [Listening Post]

The platform that Tivoli designed is supposed to make Internet radio as accessible as standard FM stations: You navigate by geographical region or genre using controls similar to the radio tuner, then drill down until you find the station you want. The larger NetWorks table player will have a remote that allows you to input stations (WFUV, WBYR etc.).

Tivoli will compile the list of stations worldwide, which at this point totals about 12,000. There are five preset buttons, but you'll also be able to store the creme-de-la-creme in a favorites folder for easy access.

The black NetWorksGo has rechargeable batteries nestled in their own built-in charger, which means you can use them or, if you're out of a charge, swap in storebought alkalines.

Both devices support Wi-Fi, and are compatible with WPA and WEP security. DeVesto says you input a password or key with the dial, which I suppose could be tedious, but he says only needs to happen once.

The radios will also be able to pull tracks (everything but iTunes DRM) from the PC, but DeVesto didn't mention what software provider would be used. I'm guessing something like ArcSoft CyberServer, but I could be wrong. Let's hope, whatever it is, it's easy. They also have USB inputs for playback of files locally.

When the conversation landed on HD Radio, DeVesto said he wasn't interested in putting it in his boxes just yet. "We're not sure what's in it for the customer," he said. – Wilson Rothman

Company Page [Tivoli Audio]

Homepage [SaveNetRadio.org]

Sure, lately most people including Giz have made Pandora out to be just a victim of the dreaded Copyright Royalty Board. But clearly the Pandora's people have been doing more than just calling congressmen and woeing their own demise. Here's the whole basket of new Pandora goodies:

• Starting now, five Sprint phones will be Pandora ready, and by the end of June, Pandora says that all Power Vision phones will be good to go. If you have a Pandora.com account, you will get "seamless integration" into your phone. Besides, you will be able to create and fine-tune stations using just the phone. After a 30-day free trial, the ad-free Sprint Pandora service will cost $2.99 per month. Keep in mind, there'd be a Sprint data-service requirement of at least $15 per month on top of that, and there's no word of how good the streaming quality is, but if you already pay for Power Vision, it's probably worth a try. Below are shots of Pandora on the defunct Samsung A900; our opening shot is of the Pandora interface on the new music phone, the UpStage.

• Sonos 2.2 software release, free to all Sonos owners and immediately available, will include a 30-day free trial of Pandora, with a given station streaming simultaneously and in perfect sync to all of your rooms, or up to 32 different Pandora stations streamed to 32 different receivers at the same time. Like the Rhapsody service offered for Sonos, the 30-day trial doesn't require a credit card; unlike Rhapsody, Pandora will cost only $36 for a full-year subscription. (You can't do as much, of course, and some people will probably want both, but it's an interesting option.)

• New Web interface, totally redesigned for "better integration of content and community." Rather than describe it, I'll just toss it in here:

• The final point of Pandora's presentation involves future applications. Wi-Fi-connected players are an obvious point. No, there is no Zune creeping into the picture (yet), but there might be a different Connect-ion: the presentation says that Pandora is showing off a Zing-enabled device. Well, the Sansa Connect is the only one of those we can think of off-hand so, like, sweet! – Wilson Rothman

Product Page [Pandora]

"Congress is calling this the grassroots campaign of the year," he says. "Office staffers say they have never received this many emails and inquiries on any issue in their congressional careers. The whole fax infrastructure of Capitol Hill was jammed for two days." (Ah, those crazy faxers.) If any of you doubts your ability to make a difference in DC, by all means keep reading.

Westergren says that the groundswell is really evidence, like the Digg riot of 2007, that people are more in control of messages thanks to the Web. "Information is becoming decentralized—now people are getting to participate. You can't mess around anymore with consumers or artists—they've got a huge megaphone. This is really the power of the people here. But this kind of power needs to be thoughtfully wielded."

I asked Westergren what it was like to find support from such unlikely allies as arch-conservative Sam Brownback. Although I assumed the cause was relatively liberal, Westergren says you can't pigeonhole net radio that way. "There's no correlation," he says. "This is not a partisan issue."

Unless something changes, July 15 will be the day that webcasters are presented a bill covering all of owed royalties dating back to the beginning of 2006, calculated using the current, oppressive rates. "Starting then," he says, "every webcaster is bankrupt, except for a couple."

The only answer, says Westergren, will come from the Capitol. "We are 100% focused on bill passage. Call your congressman or senator and ask them to support these bills. Bug them until they do it." He adds, "We're not a well-moneyed lobby, we're a young industry. There's no K Street presence here."

Well, what are you waiting for? Get to them faxes!! You may even try one of these newfangled systems for communicating with congresspersons—I'm told this "E" mail works pretty good. – Wilson Rothman

Internet Radio Coverage [Gizmodo]

"The recent U.S. Copyright Office ruling regarding webcasting designated SoundExchange to collect and distribute to all nonmembers as well as its members. The Librarian of Congress issued his decision with rates and terms to govern the compulsory license for webcasters (Internet-only radio) and simulcastors (retransmissions)."

Simply put, according to DailyKos: "If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free."

Of course, if an artist wants the money from their royalties, they have to join SoundExchange—naturally, membership takes a small "administrative fee" out of your royalty check.

So let's recap: If you're an artist whose work is played on an internet radio station, even if you're not a member of SoundExchange, they're still going to collect royalties for you. And if you don't join, you won't see a dime—it simply goes straight into their pocket. And this is legally prescribed. Awesome.– Matt Buchanan

Is the RIAA Pulling a Scam on the Music Industry? [DailyKos via Slashdot]
Image via Flickr

Since the CRB's new rates go into effect on May 15, let's hope that the bill can make its way through Congress more quickly than legislation typically does, so Internet radio broadcasters don't get slammed by the CRB's exorbitant fees. Here's an easy way to get a hold of your representative to tell them to save Internet radio and get the legislative juices flowing. – Matt Buchanan

Bill Could Save Internet Radio [Broadband Reports]
Press Release [House of Representatives]
Image via Flickr

Two misperceptions about Internet radio, according to Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren:

First:

...higher rates mean more money for artists. The reality is that the few Internet radio companies that opt to continue (and it will be VERY FEW) will be forced to license directly from labels. In this scenario, the artist share of the revenue will shrink to almost nothing as the monies will go directly to the label and be subject to the usual artist royalty rate (post-recoupment) of single digit percentages. So not only will this eliminate the vast majority of online stations that are the ONLY source of indie music exposure, it will take what little revenue is left from the artists.

...contrary to any statements by SoundExchange or RIAA representatives, Internet radio is not a highly profitable business nor will it be. For most (including Pandora), it's still a money-loser at the old rates that we are working as hard as we can (15 full time sales people are on the job) to turn profitable in a year or two. The growth figures put out by JP Morgan (recently revised downward from $500M to $150M) don't mean profitability—they mean more revenue which comes with greater costs. It's a thin margin business at best. No one's profiteering here.

For more about this situation, you can visit SaveNetRadio.org. – Wilson Rothman

Copyright Royalty Board [Gizmodo]

Apparently, arguing that the new fees will drive many stations out of business is tired old drivel according to the panel, who said that "most of the parties' arguments in support of a rehearing or reconsideration merely restate arguments that were made or evidence that was presented during the proceeding." No, there's no "manifest injustice" there.

The ruling takes effect May 15, so listen hard to your favorite Internet radio stations, since you may not be able to listen long. – Matt Buchanan

Internet radio dealt severe blow as Copyright Board rejects appeal [Ars Technica]
Image via Flickr

We imagine if anyone has the pull to effect a reversal of the new royalty scheme, it's NPR, since it's partially funded by taxpayers. Then again, funneling tax dollars to RIAA fat cats toward obscene royalty payments probably isn't all that unconscionable to some of the government officials who've been receiving massive lobbying largesse for years on end. Even though we rarely tune in, public radio is a worthy cause, so we're totally with NPR on this. – Matt Buchanan

Update: It should be noted that Sound Exchange split off from the RIAA after being created by it, and now represents indie labels as well as ones under the RIAA banner. We still think the rate hike is a bad idea, though. Thanks, Idolator for the clarification.

NPR may lead fight against Internet radio royalty rate hike [Chicago Tribune via Consumerist]

"Per performance" rates are charged per stream per listener. The example the Radio and Internet Newsletter gives is that an "audience of 500 listeners racks up 500 'performances' for each song" played. There is also a minimum fee of 500 bucks per station, even for tiny or noncommercial ones.

Why is this a big deal? "That math suggests that the royalty rate decision — for the performance alone, not even including composers' royalties! — is in the in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues." It's never enough is it? – Matt Buchanan

Webcast royalty rate decision announced [RAIN via Slashdot]
Gizmodo's RIAA boycott [Gizmodo]

We're digging Internet radio, a lot of which sounds much better than conventional FM. This unit, which reminds us a bit of the Citicorp Building in NYC, just might do the trick for a pricey $300. – Charlie White

Acoustic Energy WiFi Internet Radio [ubergizmo]

Even though Internet radio may not be as popular with the masses as terrestrial radio, the amount of programming that you can find makes jumping through hoops just to listen it worth it. That said, sitting in front of your computer all day just to listen to the latest episode of "Gregg and Tony" is kind of a drag. That's where the Scitec IR-001W comes in. It's an Internet radio that sits on your wireless LAN and plays MP3, WMA, AAC and RealMedia files, which should cover just about every type of Internet radio broadcast, including most of those lovable podcasts. Based on Reciva technology, the IR-001W can group radio stations based on geography, genre, name as well as your favorites. So if you just need to hear your European crochet radio, Scitec's got you covered.

The radio is compatible with the WEP and WPA security protocols, so you don't have to remove your wireless LAN's security in order to listen.

As for sound quality, the IR-001W only features a monaural amplifier, but does include a stereo output jack. So if you want, you can hook it up to your existing sound system and listen to higher quality sound, depending on the radio program, of course. It's coming out in Japan on July 12 and will retail for about $261. – Nicholas Deleon

Product Page (in Japanese) [Scitec via Fareastgizmos.com]