Long running music service Napster has struggled to maintain relevancy in recent years. Today the Best Buy-owned property is making a major social media push to once again reclaim some of its former glory.
The pay-to-use streaming and download web application now includes Facebook (), Twitter (), YouTube () and Flickr () integration so that users easily share their music interests with online friends and consume social media content like Flickr photos and YouTube videos from bands and artists while they listen.
On the Facebook front, Napster has integrated Facebook Instant Personalization so that users can “Like” artists, albums and playlists. The “Like” functionality is the standard Facebook offering, so Likes are shared back to user profiles and users can see which artists and songs their Facebook friends Like.
Individual tracks now also include share buttons for posting to Facebook and Twitter. Even though Napster’s service requires a pay-per-month subscription plan, friends and followers will be able to stream and listen to the shared songs for free.
In addition, users can now experience artists’ YouTube videos and Flickr photos — think studio and concert shots — available on each artist’s page.
Napster’s also made improvements to album art and reworked the credit system so that user credit balances are up-to-date and always visible in the upper left hand corner of the screen.
The changes are significant and likely the company’s best shot at reclaiming user attention. We’re especially curious to see if this update spurs more interest and helps it become more competitive with music newcomers like Spotify () that operate under slightly different models.
OAKLAND, Calif. — Tim Westergren recently sat in a Las Vegas penthouse suite, a glass of red wine in one hand and a truffle-infused Kobe beef burger in the other, courtesy of the investment bankers who were throwing a party to court him.
It was a surreal moment for Mr. Westergren, who founded Pandora, the Internet radio station. For most of its 10 years, it has been on the verge of death, struggling to find investors and battling record labels over royalties.
Had Pandora died, it would have joined myriad music start-ups in the tech company graveyard, like SpiralFrog and the original Napster. Instead, with a successful iPhone app fueling interest, Pandora is attracting attention from investment bankers who think it could go public, the pinnacle of success for a start-up.
Pandora’s 48 million users tune in an average 11.6 hours a month. That could increase as Pandora strikes deals with the makers of cars, televisions and stereos that could one day, Pandora hopes, make it as ubiquitous as AM/FM radio.
“We were in a pretty deep dark hole for a long time,” said Mr. Westergren, who is now the company's chief strategy officer.. “But now it’s a pretty out-of-body experience.”
At the end of 2009, Pandora reported its first profitable quarter and $50 million in annual revenue — mostly from ads and the rest from subscriptions and payments from iTunes and Amazon.com when people buy music. Revenue will probably be $100 million this year, said Ralph Schackart, a digital media analyst at William Blair.
Pandora’s success can be credited to old-fashioned perseverance, its ability to harness intense loyalty from users and a willingness to shift directions — from business to consumer, from subscription to free, from computer to mobile — when its fortunes flagged.
Its library now has 700,000 songs, each categorized by an employee based on 400 musical attributes, like whether the voice is breathy, like Charlotte Gainsbourg, or gravelly like Tom Waits. Listeners pick a song or musician they like, and Pandora serves up songs with similar qualities — Charlotte Gainsbourg to Feist to Viva Voce to Belle and Sebastian. Unlike other music services like MySpace Music or Spotify, now available in parts of Europe, listeners cannot request specific songs.
Though Pandora’s executives say it is focusing on growth, not a public offering, the company is taking steps to make it possible. Last month, it hired a chief financial officer, Steve Cakebread, who had that job at Salesforce.com when it went public.
It is all a long way from January 2000, when Mr. Westergren founded the company. Trained as a jazz pianist, he spent a decade playing in rock bands before taking a job as a film composer. While analyzing the construction of music to figure out what film directors would like, he came up with an idea to create a music genome.
This being 1999, he turned the idea into a Web start-up and raised $1.5 million from angel investors. It was originally called Savage Beast Technologies and sold music recommendation services to businesses like Best Buy.
By the end of 2001, he had 50 employees and no money. Every two weeks, he held all-hands meetings to beg people to work, unpaid, for another two weeks. That went on for two years.
Meanwhile, he appealed to venture capitalists, charged up 11 credit cards and considered a company trip to Reno to gamble for more money. The dot-com bubble had burst, and shell-shocked investors were not interested in a company that relied on people, who required salaries and health insurance, instead of computers.
“The pitch that he gave wasn’t that interesting,” Mr. Marcus said. “But what was incredibly interesting was Tim himself. We could tell he was an entrepreneur who wasn’t going to fail.”
Mr. Westergren took $2 million of it and called another all-hands meeting to pay everyone back. The next order of business: focus the service on consumers instead of businesses, change the name and replace Mr. Westergren as chief executive with Joe Kennedy, who had experience building consumer products at E-Loan and Saturn. Pandora’s listenership climbed, and in December 2005, it sold its first ad.
But in 2007, Pandora got news that threatened most of its revenue. A federal royalty board had raised the fee that online radio stations had to pay to record labels for each song. “Overnight our business was broken,” Mr. Westergren said. “We contemplated pulling the plug.”
Instead, Pandora hired a lobbyist in Washington and recruited its listeners to write to their representatives. “A lot of these users think they’re customers of the cause rather than users per se,” said Willy C. Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School who has written a case study on Pandora. “It’s a different spin on marketing.” The board agreed to negotiations and after two years settled on a lower rate.
Some music lovers dislike Pandora’s approach to choosing music based on its characteristics rather than cultural associations. Slacker Radio, a competitor with three times as many songs but less than a third of Pandora’s listeners, takes a different approach. A ’90s alternative station should be informed by Seattle grunge, said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president for marketing at Slacker. “It’s not just that this has an 80-beat-a-minute guitar riff,” he said. “It’s that this band toured with Eddie Vedder.”
Yet in 2008, Pandora built an iPhone app that let people stream music. Almost immediately, 35,000 new users a day joined Pandora from their cellphones, doubling the number of daily signups.
For Pandora and its listeners, it was a revelation. Internet radio was not just for the computer. People could listen to their phone on the treadmill or plug it into their car or living room speakers.
In January, Pandora announced a deal with Ford to include Pandora in its voice-activated Sync system, so drivers will be able to say, “Launch my Lady Gaga station” to play their personalized station based on the music of that performer. Consumer electronics companies like Samsung, Vizio and Sonos are also integrating Pandora into their Blu-ray players, TVs and music systems.
“Think about what made AM/FM radio so accessible,” said Mr. Kennedy, Pandora’s chief. “You get into the car or buy a clock for your nightstand and push a button and radio comes out,” he said. “That’s what we’re hoping to match.”
Dangdut music continues to be a vital part of Indonesian popular culture
Sandra Bader
The Soneta Group performing at the launching of Sonet 2 Band
Sandra Bader
The slogan ‘Dangdut Never Dies’, written in big letters, immediately leaped out at visitors entering the South Jakarta studio of TPI (Indonesian Education Television) on a Monday night in January this year. As they strolled through the building waiting for the event, they saw a number of famous dangdut legends hanging around, relaxing and chatting to each other. It appeared as if a big reunion of veteran dangdut stars of the 70s and 80s was taking place.
In fact, these celebrities were uniting to support and promote a new star in the dangdut community. They had gathered to celebrate the launching of Ridho Rhoma and his Sonet 2 Band. With this launch, Ridho is following in the footsteps of his famed father, Rhoma Irama, known as the ‘king of dangdut’. Through the Sonet 2 Band, Rhoma and Ridho are aspiring to breathe new life into the dangdut scene which has, according to them, run aground.
The king of dangdut
‘I am the founder of dangdut.’ This was the first thing Rhoma said to me when I interviewed him, before he set off on a narrative adventure that began just after the dreadful anti-communist massacres of 1965-66. It was around that same time that Rhoma Irama, a young musician, made his creative debut. Inspired by western rock music and the Malay sounds of the Orkes Melayu, Rhoma experimented by fusing Malay music with elements from rock, Indian and Arabic music. His new, energetic style invigorated the Malay music with fluid and dynamic rhythms and with this innovation he invented the distinctive genre now known as dangdut.
‘I am the founder of Dangdut.’ This was the first thing Rhoma said to me
With his Soneta Group and co-performer Elvy Sukaesih, Rhoma became the most widely recognised contemporary Indonesian musician and was crowned king of dangdut. ‘I created a musical revolution by transforming the Orkes Melayu into dangdut.’ Rhoma explained.
This new rhythm, with its lyrics dealing with the burdens of everyday life and love but touching also on social criticism and class discrimination, became immensely popular throughout Indonesia. Dangdut’s egalitarian character was an especially crucial factor in its popularity, for the music cut across class lines, appealing to the sensibilities of Indonesians of all sorts and most importantly, demonstrating sympathy with the life-worlds of the lower classes.
However, this sympathy with ordinary Indonesians devalued the music in the eyes of the upper classes, for whom it represented the culture of the village (kampungan). Moreover, dangdut’s development towards sensual and sometimes erotic dance movements has prompted some Indonesians to connect it not only with ignorance and a lack of sophistication but also with tasteless sexual displays.
A second revolution
Rhoma and Ridho duetting
Sandra Bader
In conversation about the development of dangdut music, Rhoma clearly expressed his dissatisfaction with the music’s evolution over the last few decades. Bewailing its current association with sensual and erotic dance movements, he insisted that there is only one way to dance (goyang or joget) to dangdut. Showing considerable pique, he jumped to his feet to demonstrate what ‘proper’ joget should look like. According to Rhoma, the new erotic dance style is one of the reasons for the ostensible decline in dangdut’s popularity. He remarked, ‘Since dangdut became eroticised the Indonesian people have begun to feel annoyed. Anybody who sees dangdut on TV will turn it off right away.’
Consequently, his burning ambition is to ‘safeguard’ dangdut from obliteration. He envisages a second revolution of dangdut music, to be achieved by encouraging and endorsing his son’s Sonet 2 Band. His objective is to take a stand against dangdut performers such as Inul Daratista and her characteristic ‘drill dance’ (goyang ngebor) which became extremely popular in 2003.
Dangdut’s development towards sensual and sometimes erotic dance movements has prompted some Indonesians to connect it not only with ignorance and a lack of sophistication but also with tasteless sexual displays
Inul’s dance style led to a massive controversy about the nation’s ‘moral health’. Indonesia’s senior Islamic clerics, the MUI (Council of Ulama), described her dancing as pornographic. The MUI regarded her appearance as a threat to morality and perceived the social stability of Indonesian society to be at risk. As a result, the MUI issued a legal opinion (fatwa) against her and she was banned from performing in several regions of Indonesia. Inul’s body became politicised, in the process bringing a number of important issues about Indonesia’s politics, culture and moral values to the surface.
Is dangdut disappearing?
A number of newspapers and magazines have recently published articles arguing that by and large, dangdut is disappearing, an interpretation which seems to affirm Rhoma’s impression that the music is currently in decline in Indonesia. This concern might appear to have substance if one observes the programs currently screening on Indonesian TV stations. For a long period, almost every station broadcasted dangdut programs as they jumped on the bandwagon created by Inulmania. ‘Indonesians love sensations.’ explained TPI’s production manager and Inul was certainly a sensation, becoming a star overnight with her trademark dance.
But then other ‘Inuls’ sprang up, like Dewi Persik with her ‘saw dance’ (goyang gergaji) and Annisa Bahar with her ‘broken dance’ (goyang patah-patah). After a while, the product became mundane and several TV stations, especially those with middle and upper class target audiences, turned away to search for new crowd-pleasers. As a result, only a few TV stations are currently airing dangdut shows.
Nonetheless, dangdut is still the genre in Indonesia’s popular music scene. It has the highest turnover of music recordings, albeit mostly pirated. More than two thirds of all dangdut recordings are reproduced illegally, causing financial difficulties for recording companies who have consequently refrained from producing new recordings. Very few new albums have been released lately, partly as a result of this persistent pirating of CDs, VCDs and DVDs. Dangdut also has to compete fiercely with the current surge of Indonesian pop music.
Sonet 2 – a second revolution?
Sonet 2 Band performing at the Trans7 studio
Sandra Bader
Rhoma and Ridho and the five members of Sonet 2 Band are determined to counteract these recent developments, which appear to have left dangdut withering on the vine. For one thing, they are eager to improve what they regard as dangdut’s ‘seedy’ reputation. Apart from that, they aspire to achieve popularity on par with famous Indonesian pop and rock bands such as Slank, Dewa, Peterpan and others. They have been working hard towards this goal. They perform often and at diverse events, have released their first album and produced their first videoclip. Their album, called Menunggu, features 10 songs selected from Rhoma’s ample repertoire. The Sonet 2 Band has modified these songs by adding a dominant pop-drum beat in place of the beat of the tabla (an Indian percussion instrument) and the new guitar parts have given some of the songs a subtle rock strain. They have already attracted quite a following and if all goes well they will not be just another sensation but could succeed in opening a new chapter for dangdut. ii
Sandra Bader is a PhD student in Anthropology at Monash University researching dangdut music in Indonesia.
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