With iTunes 8 just around the corner and some rumored changes that include iTunes suggesting songs you might like or in some way to grouping your music better, I saw a potential acquisition for Apple or possibility or partnership with the Internet radio station Pandora.
Pandora uses what it terms “the music genome” that it has been developing since the being of the millennium. Engineers break the music down into it’s musical DNA and then sets about finding long lost relatives. Did you know that Beatles song “Hey Jude” is actually the long-lost great-grandfather of Britney Spears’ “Oops I did it again”? Anyway, there’s some magic under the hood and most of the time it works pretty well.
For me, living in Canada, Pandora is long gone. I used to listen to it regularly, but last year it became limited to within US borders due to another of the music industry’s crackdown schemes.
Now the music industry is doing it again as the Copyright Royalty Board requested that performance royalties be doubled and then some. The will cripple Pandora’s revenue potential. There’s talk of pulling the plug at Pandora. They just cannot afford to function as a business with costs that high.
Now that the rumor of Apple’s new Pandora-ish (as I see it) iTunes features in iTunes 8, I cannot help wonder if it would be in the interests of both Apple and Pandora to work together on this. Pandora may be going cheap right now if they are talking of pulling the plug. Apple is always trying to creep further and further into the entertainment industry, and if they can use the Pandora technology in iTunes I think the days of people complaining about iTunes inability to do shuffle may be long gone.