Pocket Change - Shopping Blog

Pandora + MySpace = Best Idea Ever. Too bad it doesn’t exist yet. Pandora has been my favorite site for discovering new music for quite a while now. It’s free, high-quality streaming radio that uses the Music Genome Project to match songs to your preferences (you like songs with horns, you like crunchy guitars, you don’t like falsetto vocals…) and adapts to your feedback. It has led me to purchase a remarkable number of CDs from artists I had never heard of before. And I LOVE that the site accepts unsigned bands and constantly promotes good music in their blog.

A while ago, I came up with an idea that MySpace should have something similar to Pandora—a streaming player that uses the music from their MySpace artist profiles. Perhaps it could even link up with Pandora and splice in music from the Music Genome Project. It would be the perfect way to browse the site—just put in some information about your preferences and you’re off. Maybe you could narrow it by location, and listen only to bands with a gig in your area that night.

I really wanted to see this idea in action, so I tried to contact the guys over at Pure Volume. Pure Volume is similar to MySpace, but more intensely focused on music—and rock in particular. Well, I never got to tell them the idea, but it turns out they were already doing it (almost). Their My Music Player just launched last week.

I was initially very excited about this, but unfortunately, it turns out that Pure Volume’s business model prevents this player from ever being any good. The player will only randomly jump to artists that pay Pure Volume an annual fee to upgrade to Pro status (it’s the same with the “Pure Picks” on their homepage). Reminds me a bit of payola—and Pure Volume doesn’t make this relationship clear to the average listener. I had to hit their “random profile jump” button at the bottom of profile pages 10 times before concluding that I’d never be taken to an artist without Pro status.

While Pure Volume does have a lot of bands paying the fee, it’s far below the threshold of the number of bands they would need to qualify this player as a music discovery tool. I also have some philosophical issues with the whole idea of suppressing music unless the artists cough up a fee.

So no thanks, Pure Volume. As a listener, I’ll be sticking with Pandora.com. As a musician, my free, untainted MySpace account drives more volume anyway.

I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that the two sites will marry soon enough.

AJ