« (...) Customising stations certainly helped me shape the song selections more to my liking, though with only 15,000 artists and 200,000 songs in rotation, the service has limits to what it can play. For instance, at review time, just 10 Queen songs were in the system. (According to Jango, the service has access to much more music than is listed, but analysing it and adding it to the listener database takes time. Jango also says it is constantly adding tunes to the rotation.)
Since Jango follows restrictions defined by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - and pays royalties to labels and artists - the site is perfectly legal. Jango makes money when you click on links to buy music through its partners as well as through advertising.
Jango's real prowess lies in its social-networking features, which help you hook up with people who have the same good (or bad) taste as you when you create a Jango profile. The Jango player (located at the upper-right of the Jango browser window) displays alternate songs by the currently playing artist, as well as users who are listening to the same performer or similar artists.
Clicking on a song takes you to the station that's playing it; selecting a user takes you to their Jango profile page, where you can check out that person's stations and other information (birth date, location and favorite books and movies, for example) that they have chosen to share. »
March 5, 2008 Jango beta internet radio site review, PC Adviser
« Jango.com launched in July with a preview of a social network wrapped around a personalized webcasting service. Within two months of its formal debut in November, it had attracted 1 million listeners who created 3 million customized stations. Chief Executive Dan Kaufman says he expects to reach 2.5 million unique listeners this month. An audience that size can run up big royalty bills in a hurry -- more than $50,000 per collective hour of music played. (...) "We have, I don't know, 500%, 1,000% more opportunities to show a visual ad than Pandora or Yahoo or AOL," Kaufman said. "Even with a very low CPM [the fee charged advertisers each time their pitch is seen], we break even with a very small number of users, relative to the other guys." Jango's approach reflects one vision for the future of the music business. It's not about selling recordings; it's about monetizing the time people spend listening to music.
That's why Jango surrounds its webcast with social features, such as the ability to find people with similar musical tastes and listen to the stations they designed. It has many of the usual elements, such as the ability to send instant messages to friends and e-mail to other users. But it also has some nifty little touches -- for example, prompting users to send thank-you notes electronically when they stop listening to someone else's station. It also tries to keep people interacting with the site's musical content by rating songs, reading about artists, creating new stations and recommending their creations to friends. (...)Just to cover royalties obligations, a music webcaster has to generate a little more than 2 cents per user per hour this year (assuming it plays 15 songs per hour). That number, which rises to 2.85 cents by 2010, seems minuscule, but webcasters say they raise only 1.5 cents to 2.5 cents per listener per hour on average.» fonte: How to get ahead in webcasting By Jon Healey Los ANgeles Times March 21, 2008
