Music Ally

Pandora Chief Strategy Officer Tim Westergren founded interactive radio service Pandora in 2000. The innovative service draws upon music recommendations based upon human experience rather than computer algorithms alone; its iPhone app has brought new success in the US market, although Pandora is no longer available to UK residents.

We interviewed Westergren for a feature on the future of free licensed digital music as part of the latest Music Ally Report, which subscribers can read here – while non-subscribers cansign up for a free trial. Find the Q&A after the jump.

(more…)

Spotify is diversifying beyond music into audiobooks, kicking off with one that will be of interest to many Music Ally readers. It’s Chris Anderson’s ‘Free: The Future of a Radical Price’, which is finally due out this month.

The audiobook version will be available to all UK users of Spotify, which means the company has neatly sidestepped the possible irony of only making it available to paying premium users.

“This is the first audiobook we”ve ever included in our catalogue,” says Spotify’s blog post announcing the news. “We’re going to see what people think and who knows, maybe this is the start of something new for us…”

Fancy a listen? Click here.

Brickbats are being fired at digital thinker Chris Anderson, after it was claimed that a number of passages in his new Free: The Future of a Radical Price book were lifted verbatim from Wikipedia.

The Virginia Quarterly Review uncovered this, and highlights several examples in this article. None were credited as the work of Wikipedia contributors in the book. Anderson says it’s a cock-up, rather than plagiarism.

“All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources,” he says in his response, while promising to publish the correct attributions online.

The irony of Anderson cutting and pasting material from a free website into a book being sold for $26.99 won”t be lost on his online detractors, though.