Selecting what to play: the pain. The Pain.

I overheard the Pandora CEO justifying their market cap now that they are a publicly traded company and he said something that was very interesting to me.

Something to the effect that 60-80% of the time people do NOT want to choose what music they want to listen to, but have it chosen for them. Now, for the dominant internet radio website, it makes sense that they would say something like this. But is it true? And for however true it is, what does it mean for audiophiles?

Audiophiles who have nothing of audiophile quality that plays music for us [excluding friends and significant others].

Yeah, there are some nice tuners and some music servers out there – but hardly what one would call audiophile-quality.

Like, you know, why can’t a $100K turntable come with a mechanism – totally detached from but designed to work with the table – that randomly selects albums and plays them for us? Or a CD carousel player with a similar quality profile?

Anyway, I do think that it is a pain to pick out music to play all the time and I can understand why people accept a degradation in sonic performance in order to have someone else do it for them. Not sure any of this justifies Pandora’s stock price – but that is not going to bother me late at night.

[I know. Not many posts lately. The system sounded great and I stayed away from the paper and online rags But that only lasted so long… ;-). There is a lot more to talk about… in future posts here.]