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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Help Pandora — save online radio

The free and highly entertaining online radio website Pandora.com — one of the most readily accessible portals to music you’ll probably enjoy, but never heard before — needs help from all listeners to pressure the Senate to pass a bill supportive of its continuance. At issue is the backbreaking level of royalty payments being urged on this site and others like it by lobbyists for the National Association of Broadcasters, those giant broadcasters (think Clear Channel) who would monopolize the airwaves with formulaic playlists promoting a low-common-denominator monoculture. 

What Pandora offers is better (more open. exploratory, innovative) than that, and in this case surprising supported by the Recording Industry Association of America, the group that’s been suing music downloaders on behalf of the record industry. Ridiculous as that effort is, by standing with Pandora RIAA gets it right. Take a look at Pandora founder Tim Westergren’s blog for details of the grass-roots phone-in campaign that pushed favorable legislation through the House of Reps. — and sign up to protect a free ‘n’ easy way to sample music beyond whatever music you personally already are into, rather than being stuck with whatever top 100 cuts stations figure everyone can deal with. As if we are all one undifferentiated ear!
 

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Pandora radio on deathbed?

The wonderful web radio giant Pandora.com — and lesser web radio sites, too — are reportedly about to be done in by per-song performance royalty rates doubled last year by a federal panel. Pandora’s founder says he’ll have to shut it down soon if the terms can’t be changed. Read the whole story in the Washington Post, and wonder who has it in for the free dissemination of music that we don’t know but might like anyway.  

[Read more…]

iPhone + Pandora = open sesame


According to Slate
(formerly, Salon’s) tech writer Farhad Manjoo, reviewing the
iPhone makeover and cool third-party programs that optomize its
potential, the expense and hassle of securing the new device is worthwhile
if only for mobile access to Pandora.com.   The personally-programmed radio site has captivated me, too
— Pandora’s Music Genome Project reliably
streams known and unknown music I like — jazz-beyond-jazz — on my B **tches Brew “station”
in surprising juxtapositions and successions.
Virtually free, nearly boundless music exploration at one’s fingertips!

[Read more…]

Howard Mandel

I'm a Chicago-born (and after 32 years in NYC, recently repatriated) writer, editor, author, arts reporter for National Public Radio, consultant and nascent videographer -- a veteran freelance journalist working on newspapers, magazines and websites, appearing on tv and radio, teaching at New York University and elsewhere, consulting on media, publishing and jazz-related issues. I'm president of the Jazz Journalists Association, a non-profit membership organization devoted to using all media to disseminate news and views about all kinds of jazz.
My books are Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999) and Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge, 2008). I was general editor of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Flame Tree 2005/Billboard Books 2006). Of course I'm working on something new. . . Read More…

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