In an earlier blog post I discussed the impact of Pandora being branded as free internet radio and promised to make suggestions for improvement.  So here’s to keeping promises.

According to Wiktionary, Half Baked means “ill-conceived, unsound or badly thought out” and I think that accurately describes how the Pandora 40 Hour Limit service interruption currently works.  Obviously it interrupts service as intended, but at what cost to Pandora and the listener?  Much of it is a matter of the language used in the service interruption notice which I refer to as the 40 hour limit road block.

When you consider the cost of attracting new customers, you really can’t afford to run them off – even the free ones.

I see the 40 hour limit road block, to be a great marketing opportunity.

When your time runs out, you can...

How the 40 Hour Limit Road Block is Half Baked:

Well, this is what you see (graphic above, typed out below) when your service is interrupted at the 40 hour mark:

You’ve reached the monthly free listening limit.  Pandora gives you (leader4hire@yahoo….) 40 hours of free listening each month.  To continue listening, we ask you to do one of the following:

For just 99 cents, ontinue listening as much as you’d like for the rest of the month.

For $36, enjoy an entire year of unlimited listening, plus great features:

No visual or audio advertising

Very high audio quality (192 kilobits per second).

Learn about all the Pandora One features.  To continue listening for free, simply come back on December 1.  The 40 hour limit is reset every month.

I think this message was crafted by someone in the web app department because there isn’t an ounce of friendly, customer centric, marketing copy in this whole message. Nothing makes me say “Yes, I want to do this”.  I think if the marketing department was involved, this would look more like an ad and less like a court summons.

Definitely seems half baked to put such an unfriendly message in front of the customer when they are at a critical decision point about your service.

A Closer Look

(hey moocher,) You’ve reached your monthly free listening limit.

Do you really need to make it so obvious that you attracted me to your free service, I used the free service, and now I’m being pointed at for using it?  What if this was my first month of service and I didn’t know, I may have been in love with your service, but this doesn’t make me feel good.  You’ve already started this critical conversation with a negative tone.  And in my case, I’ve been a long time user and I still hate this message, yet I still love Pandora over it’s competition.

Pandora gives you (leader4hire@yahoo…) 40 hours of free listening each month (and you better be thankful).

Yep, definitely feeling like you are pointing a finger at me.  I don’t like being singled out like this, even if no one else can see it, I don’t like how you present it.

To continue listening, we ask you do one of the following… (spend your money or else).

You must think you are the only guy in town and that I can’t find free music somewhere else. Customers shop with their dollars every day deciding where to spend or not spend their money.  When you are online this is even more difficult if their are a lot of free alternatives.  Tone has a lot to do with my perception and how I will spend my dollars.

Then the sterile report on price options and the rather valueless offer on the Pandora One service. In my mind, the other Pandora One benefits such as the skins, mini player, desktop application, and 5 hours before timeout are much more compelling then high quality and no ads.

Overall, the voice, tone, and “offer” to spend money just doesn’t make me feel special.  I may really like the service, but when you boil it down to these terms, I’m just not interested.  I think many of your listeners come to the same conclusion.

Resetting the Timer for Full Bake

What if this 40 hour roadblock was reconsidered from a marketing stand point.  What if the point was to attract the listener and move them closer to your brand, not away from the brand?  What would you do then?

Here is what I suggest as a better option… Sell me, don’t tell me .

Give me the rest of the month free!

Wild idea, I know, but see, I’m logged in and I’m valuable as a listener and important to advertisers.  So, what if the first 40 hour limit road block notice said something like:

Suggested ad copy:

Hey Leader4hire@yahoo…  You’ve been a busy listener and hit our 40 hour limit.  Betcha didn’t know we were counting!

This is the first time for you and you may not know that most listeners use less than 40 hours in a month.  You on the other hand are a true fan of music and the music legends are smiling down upon you. We would normally suggest you upgrade your account here, but Tim Westergren, the President of Pandora is going to cover you for this month.  The next time you hit 40 hours in a month, we’ll ask you to consider upgrading your membership so you can keep listening.  Okay?  Click here for Tim to spot you for the rest of the month at no charge.  Click here to go ahead and upgrade or Click here to wait until next month for another bank of 40 hours.

What to do with Tim’s Freebie Listeners?

From then on, I recommend your tech guys enhance the player to report my time for the rest of the month. Once I click to accept Tim’s free offer, my Pandora player would give me a counter showing me how many hours I’ve listened with a note that said “Tim sponsored you this month” and make it clickable to a blog post by Tim on this free month with user comments showing below. I bet it would have a ton of users saying thanks.

Why?

By the way, you would go ahead and give me this ‘free’ month because by giving me something I am more likely to give you something in return.  In psychology its classified as the rule of reciprocation in which we feel a strong obligation to repay debts.  Now, this is difficult online, but it’s still effective if you work it properly.  In this case, you’ve created value in something I thought was free, interrupted me and told me in a nice way that builds value in our relationship and as a listener that it normally cost money, but not this time.  So, in return I’ll feel special (or more special) and make a mental note that this could have cost me something, but you did me a favor.  Will people keep listening and still not upgrade next month – yes, but its worth the cost.

Remind them of the favor.

Now the payoff comes from taking advantage of the favor from that point forward.  Every time I log in the rest of that month, remind me that Tim hooked me up, tell me how many hours I’ve listend too so far and tell me you are glad I’m still listening and hungry for more.  Then, as I get closer to the end of the month encourage me to go ahead and upgrade and get something free (a hat, a shirt, a poster, a free download etc – all cheap stuff).  I’ll be spending a lot of time thinking about the free ride im taking, valuing my service, and rationalizing my future expense.  Then when the new month hits, tell me I get to start over at 40 hours but remind me Ive already got my free pass from Tim and that you would love to have me as a Pandora One member.  Follow me for the following 40 hours of my new month reminding me and smartly nudging me forward to the upgrade.  Then at the end of 40 hours, give me a very friendly service interruption.  Perhaps tell me that I seem to really like Pearl Jam, Tool, and Nine Inch Nails (my top 3 stations) and that Pandora has cataloged over 400 (correct number here) songs by those artists and you’d hate to see me lose touch with my favorite bands.  Encourage me to upgrade and get more of what I like with no restrictions.

Nice try Justin, show me another way.

Ok, what if you just took the current road block and rewrote it with a more friendly tone like this:

Suggested Ad Copy:

Leader4hire just rocked out 40 hours of free streaming radio and it’s only Thursday October 16^th.  You still have 15 days until the hours reset on November 1.

We bet you love Pandora.com and we want you to keep listening, don’t wait 15 days to come back.

Like your local pool hall or diner’s jukebox, drop 4 quarters (99 cents actually) and we’ll rock your socks off for the rest of the month – promise!

Or even better, show your support of the Music Genome Project and become a Pandora One member for only $3 a month ($36 a year).  You’ll get a free Pandora One badge for your site, all access to the Pandora One members-only club and members only downloads.  As an added bonus, we’ll stop those ads from showing in your Pandora player or playing commercials interrupting your playlist and we’ll give you a cool desktop Pandora player, a longer window to listen before we check to see if your still there, and high quality music.

See what we are doing here?  We are talking about what I like and how I like it.  This makes me sound like you really don’t want to cut me off and you are trying to work with me and you understand me.

If you really wanted to get clever and include an advertiser, here is the perfect hook:

Add a note in the more friendly version that says:

If none of these work for you, you can fill out this long form and we will see if we can get an advertiser to sponsor your listening, but you’ll need to fill it out completely and yes, we’ll be sharing your information with the advertiser so they can try to do business with you in exchange for giving you a free Pandora One subscription.  It’s the best we can do to keep Pandora from costing you money even when it costs us.  We’d rather see you be a Pandora One member though.

Still not sure what to do?  Okay, just come back on November 1 and you’ll have a fresh 40 hours to work with.

One last idea, Pandora should get my friend to buy:

Why not give me a way to share my service interruption with friends to see if they can buy my month or my Pandora One membership for me?  This would act as both a soliciting tool for the listener and a recruiting tool for new listeners.  In the months around Christmas and the listeners birthday, this might be an easy (very easy?) sale if the listener was prompted to share.  The trick here is to make it very easy, no complicated forms, now date of birth, city or state – just friends name and email with an optional message.

Bottom Line:

The 40 hour road block is not a notice to stop listening, it’s an invitation to keep listening (provided the listener acknowledges the value of Pandora’s service).  So, instead of throwing up a stop sign and pushing them in or out, try replacing the stop sign with a friendly greeter who sounds nice and interested in me as a listener.  Really wow me by giving me a free pass with a reminder that next time it’ll cost me.  Then work with me and remind me.  The sum of all those tiny touches will lead to me to take a more favorable view of Pandora and ultimately increase my willingness to open my wallet.  May sound far fetched, but it happens all the time from free samples at the grocery store to lunch and learn seminars to test drives at car dealerships and free mail list services like mailchimp.com.

Last.fm versus Pandora.com

I’ve been going back and forth between last.fm and pandora.com over the last month or two and have reached a verdict on these two free internet radio stations.

Last.fm is superior at:

Initial station setup when creating account – basically a comma separated list of band names in one box. Very easy.

• Commenting the song you are listening too.
• Introducing you to possible friends and telling you how closely your musical preferences match
• Showing your most listened to songs and artist (and other users)
• Recommending other artists I might like
• Integrating with your devices (pc to mobile to website)
• Introducing you to a wider range of artists faster due to scrobbling
• More to look at, interact with and do on the site
• Promoting their paid users with the little black square

Pandora.com is superior at:

• Music on initial site load
• Playing the song quickly without buffering or queuing
• 99.99% never a “my station wont load” experience
• Providing a simplified user experience
• Providing entertaining ads and skins and stations based on advertisers

Despite a longer list for last.fm, I see pandora.com as the clear winner if what you care about is a reliable online radio player that’s usable, loads well and efficient.

I’m also more connected to my Pandora experience because of the thumbs up thumbs down option and the ability to change stations and get information easily within the Pandora interface. To me, as far as an internet radio player goes, Pandora.com is the best.

I’m looking through WordPress plugins and found this widget that lets your WP site show your latest tunes from Last.FM.  As it happens, I’m a huge pandora.com fan and am actually listening to Pandora right now… wish we had a Pandora WordPress Widget because I’d plug it in for sure.  For now, you can click here to see my listening habits….

Oh wow, now I see something I haven’t noticed before, an embed code.  Lets try it!

Dear Tim Westergren and the Pandora.com team,
This is an open letter to you, my dearest friend at Pandora, the worlds best (free) internet radio. Like a brother in arms or a fraternity brother in the wee hours of a long night of debauchery, I’m going to shoot you straight, but I won’t leave you hanging.

Let’s talk about your identity crisis, or as I like to think of it:
Pandora, a Crisis of Disbelief.

Lets start with the fundamental issue. The root cause if you will. The Positioning of Pandora.com.

The marketing classic, “Positioning – a battle for your mind”, is a great book by Al Reis and Jack Trout and considered by many in the industry to be the authority on the topic of positioning for companies, products, and services. Although there are different definitions of Positioning, probably the most common is: “A product’s position is how potential buyers see the product”, and is expressed relative to the position of competitors. In this book, they have some great examples of positioning. One such example illustrates why Xerox can’t sell computers and IBM can’t sell copiers despite the millions of dollars they put into product development and advertising. In the mind of the customer, Xerox means copiers and IBM means computers no matter how much money either entity puts into trying to do something different than their core. You see, IBM = Computers and Xerox = Copiers. Just ask anyone on the street, they will tell you the same thing.

Enter Pandora. Pandora, you have built yourself on the back of free internet radio. This means all those years of saying and doing free internet radio has positioned you in the customers mind to mean free internet radio. So, like it or not Pandora = free internet radio in the mind of the customer. Hence your identity crisis and why your customers are going through a Crisis of Disbelief.

<title>Pandora Radio – Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music</title>

To further confuse things, you still keep the “free internet radio” message in your Pandora.com browser title and repeat that message all over your website. So, after 9 years of operations and roughly $65 million in funding, all your users from the internet to iPhone to Blackberry and on and on have bought into your position of free internet radio. This is good, Pandora. This means unlike deezer.com, dizzler.com, bluebeat.com, grooveshark.com and all the others, you have earned the position as free internet radio. You, not anyone else, means free internet radio. What a wonderful position to own. Just like craigslist.com means free internet classifieds and pentyoffish.com means free dating site. All great places to be in the long-term.

Perception is reality (or should we say Position is reality).

The reason your listeners are crying like little girls at a midnight showing of the Titanic is because you have spent your whole life saying one thing and now you are doing something completely different.

I have plenty of money, but I didn’t expect to give you any.

If you go to the movie theater you expect to pay to watch it. If you go to a restaurant, you expect to pay for your food. If you go to the park, you don’t expect to pay for the sun to shine. Wait, what? See, the park has a position in your mind and by default that position means fresh air, family fun, and sunshine. If you put a park ranger out there to charge for being in the sun, it won’t matter who the people are (millionaires or bums), you’re going to run them off because the position and expectations don’t match what it means to go to the park. In your case, Pandora means free internet radio – all the time, not up to 40 hours. Where you might be tempted to think you are just getting backlash from the ‘poor’ listeners, that would be completely inaccurate. These listeners are operating on the position and expectations you created. The same things they fell in love with. See, it’s really not about the money, it’s about the position of Pandora.com no longer syncing up. Unfortunately most people can’t tell you what they are feeling in a meaningful way, they just throw up the price because it’s the easiest to zero in on. Additionally, with the paid advertising, they expect that you are making money and don’t need to charge them. Stupid, I know.

Stop your belly aching, we gotta make money don’t we?

Absolutely. I can assure you every one of your listeners wants you to make money and stay in business. This is also why the listeners are accepting of the ads because they know you have to make money somewhere since you are “free to listeners”. The key here, is that the listeners don’t expect you to try to make money off of them. If you want to give up your dominate position as free internet radio and see your listeners drop thus dropping your traffic and number of ad impressions, then keep on the path you are on now. If you want to continue to be the biggest player, clearly head and shoulders above everyone else, rethink the value of your position and what it means before you reposition yourself to something you wish you hadn’t.

What would Google Do?

Just like they don’t charge for all those extremely valuable search results, they wouldn’t charge for listening to the radio either.

It’s the listeners, stupid.

Your die hard listeners, the ones busting the 40 hour limit are your most loyal listeners and also make the best prospect for your advertisers because these listeners provide advertisers the consumption of their ads over and over – an advertising concept known as frequency. Because you have customers that stay on your site for HOURS, you are proving to be one of the most prominent ad networks online. You want as many of these ‘power listeners’ as possible because your advertisers want them. From looking at blogs and comments posted on the 40 hour limit, I see a trend of people reaching this limit as a product of listening at work. This is great news for Pandora. This means your listeners are by-passing their local radio station to listen to you, thus Pandora is becoming their local radio station. This is huge! Add elements to user profile to indicate the area you live in. Then you have the ability to target users in a market for advertisers and ultimately would open you up to allow media buys from hyper local advertisers who want to tell that guy at work that he can go to the sandwich shop in his home town for lunch instead of the current advertiser, Jimmy Johns, which isn’t in my market – but their ad and message is perfect for this medium and if they were in my market, mmmm sandwich time.

By limiting 40 hour or more listeners you do 3 things:

1. Erode your best asset for the advertisers you sell
2. Debunk your evangelists who praised and recruited people to Pandora.com causing them to work twice as hard to undo you, either intentionally or not.
3. Push your loyal fans into the arms of the next best “free internet radio” service which will later monetize their site in a better way having learned from your mistakes.

Buzz meter goes up then goes bust.

You will see a drop in your traffic as well as your apps downloads, your impressions served, and your new user signups. This is inevitable due to the power of buzz going from positive to negative like a wildfire with increasing winds. Your buzz has been positive overall, continually building on your position of free internet radio, but that may shift quickly and with a tremendously negative impact. As more and more people talk about this 40 hour limit, more people will seek alternatives before they ever sign up.

Begin the demise of Pandora.com (see also the twitter effect killing Bruno the first week in the box office). I like Pandora so much, I can not even vet out what the demise of Pandora.com would be like. Lets prevent this before it happens.

What is the best way to handle this?

Assuming Pandora.com values, cherishes, and wants to maintain the position of free internet radio in the mind of everyone, they need to keep the free internet radio message and own it at all levels. It means that instead of penalizing the 40 hour listener, they embrace and develop that habit, that addiction to the service. Perhaps a few suggestions can get you thinking about other ways to monetize it.

Let the ideas flow:

Sponsor a listener program
Offer people, business, corps, causes etc to pay any sum $10 or $10,000 to sponsor free listening for others. You can hold an annual fund raiser for this, put a huge marketing spin on it for all kind of PR that will grow the Pandora brand. Promise to donate a portion of the revenue to a good cause so it has the warm fuzzy element, then reward listeners with ongoing free listening (with ads showing). This way you can continue to monetize the user clicks for thumbs up/down, play/pause etc which is good for your advertisers. Your fans will love you more and will work harder for you. For more clarity on this model, just look at what PBS does every year (or NPR for radio) both of which aren’t far from Jerry’s Kids. The point here is that it works and will work for you if you just have a little imagination. And its not just for funds but great PR (and will not run off your listeners).

Promote membership
If you want to monetize the user, go for it, but don’t put me in fight or flight mode. Offer things that reward membership or transactions. For example, Pandora exclusive concert ticket purchasing at a Pandora price for paid members. Partner with an advertiser and give Pandora members special incentives when they purchase the membership. For example, pay $50 and get $25 in Rock Band credit. In other words, you can use promotions to drive membership, not a road block to your service.

Make me feel special and I’ll give you more
Develop Pandora exclusive content only available to members. This can be tshirts, books, compilation CD’s etc. Take a look at bluebeat.com and see about a similar setup where members can create their own playlist and share with friends this way they can have a little more control over the Pandora experience. Similarly, with grooveshark.com you can play a specific song pretty much on demand which is might be an example of something a member could do. Lastly, since you know so much about my musical interest, use that information and present hyper relevant products to me. By doing this, you give me access to things that I otherwise may not have known about. For example, I am a major nine inch nails fan, but don’t always know what’s going on with nin fan club promotions – however, I am always on Pandora.com and you can see I have a nin station and thumbs up nin when they play on my other stations. This means you can keep me tapped in as a one stop location for all my musical interest.

Feel free to chime in, agree or disagree. Think about your position. Pandora = Free Internet Radio. Or does it?

Potentially more to follow…

Regards,
Justin McCullough
leader4hire

http://www.pandora.com/people/leader4hire