Day of Silence
June 25, 2007
Starting at 12:00AM Eastern time on June 26, 2007, Pandora will be participating in the Internet Radio “Day of Silence.”
Joining Pandora are Yahoo, Live365, MTV, SomaFM, Bagel Radio, Rhapsody, and dozens of small webcasters. The idea behind this event is to give everyone a glimpse of what it will be like if the oppressive royalty rates recently set by the Copyright Royalty Board are left unchanged. You can read more about the issue at SaveNetRadio.org. There are bills pending in both the Senate and in the House and I’d encourage you to lend your voice to the cause if you love Internet Radio. Please call your representative to let them know that this is an issue that matters to you.
While I believe in the statement we’re making with the Day of Silence, this is a painful night for me. Taking Pandora off the air is something that we don’t do lightly — in fact when we moved datacenters a year ago we worked long and hard to ensure that we didn’t have any down time at all during that transition. To take our music off the air intentionally is completely unprecedented in our 2 year history. It’s not something that I’ll enjoy. Here’s hoping though that the Day of Silence helps to move our lawmakers into action, so I don’t someday in the not-too-distant future have to pull the plug on Pandora entirely.
June 26, 2007 at 3:40 am
The fact that it’s being done is a step showing how serious of an issue it really is. I’m happy to see Pandora participate, and I would had been disappointed if they didn’t. People will take notice. And then hopefully action.
June 26, 2007 at 8:42 am
Thansk Gabe. While I have some sympathy for those that argue that our listeners shouldn’t be made to suffer for this situation, the reality is that we’ll all suffer should these rates be upheld. It really will mean the end of Internet Radio here in the U.S. as webcasters both small and large are put in a position where it’s simply not economic to continue to broadcast.
Thansk again for your support today and throughout Pandora’s history.
July 9, 2007 at 8:36 pm
I do hope you bring Canada back into Pandora.com — why not use
Canadian servers? Right now, I am using Last.fm (e.g.
http://www.last.fm/music/Thievery+Corporation), but I do miss Pandora,
and so do many others!
http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/archives/2007/05/canada.html
If you want my opinion… you should create an Instant Message
application with Pandora. Many people use Instant Message
applications (MSN, YahooIM, etc.) - so here’s my suggestion…
seriously… have Pandora incorporated into GoogleTalk!
http://googletalk.blogspot.com/
http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/request.py?contact_type=story&Action.Search=Continue
Talk to Google about this. Pandora will live on!