Dave Haynes

Pandora launched a desktop application for its personalised radio service today taking it out of the browser and onto my desktop. It’s built on Adobe AIR the same technology that powers my much loved and used Twitter client - Twhirl

Luckily I have a little workaround to avoid the UK restrictions on the service (which has irritated some people) and I’ve been using it all day and overall I’m quite impressed and is definitely something I’ll continue to use. I love Pandora and it’s great to use when you don’t want the hassle of picking something out to play or you just want something that fits a certain mood. The app has come into some love, some criticism and some mixed reactions, so here’s a quick summary of the pros and cons.

THE PROS

The major advantage is that you don’t have to being running a tab in your browser all day for Pandora. If you’re anything like me then you’re running Firefox and probably have about 4 or 5 different windows open at any one time. It’s nice to free up a bit of room in the browser. This makes a lot of sense and is part of a general future trend that we’ll see towards web applications on the desktop and SSB’s (Site Specific Browser) a concept I first got my head round when looking at Mozilla’s Prism project. It’s nice to be able to have a direct shortcut to run Pandora from my desktop and be able to minimize it to the system tray. This Adobe Air app also adds some nice functionality via a contextual menu that pops up when you right click on the icon that is displayed in your system tray. For example you can pause / resume and view what track is playing.

THE CONS

On the other hand I think more could have been achieved here. The app essentially just looks like Pandora does in a browser window. This is largely due to Pandora’s dilemma with advertisers. Why would advertisers pay for real estate on Pandora if all their users are just passively listening via a minimized app sitting in the system tray? And without advertising Pandora would likely shut down. At least Pandora have the decency to explain this in their post about the new Pandora Desktop Beta.

One big caveat: it’s important to understand that at Pandora we have big licensing and streaming bills to pay and from the beginning we’ve been working hard to figure out that piece of the puzzle. That means that advertising is an integral part of the Pandora experience and in an effort to keep the advertising as unobtrusive as possible we’ve focused on graphical ads rather than audio ads. The one downside to that is that we need lots of pixels to run the ads, so one thing you’ll find with the desktop app is it’s not some tiny little widget. As nice as that would be, it would make it basically impossible for us to cover our costs with advertising.

This is going to be a big issue for all similar music services going forward. If you’re going to offer a smart, sleek and discrete service and you’re not inserting ads into the audio stream then you’re faced with the problem of how to serve up other types of advertising and banners.

In any case it will be interesting to see just how this particular app develops. As Tom, CTO at Pandora explains:

… this is just a start for us — just a baby step. The benefits over the website are in fact pretty modest right now to be sure but we wanted to get it out there both to start getting feedback and to gauge demand.