Getting our music on Pandora ( how we did it )
Our new pals.
Well, at last – Too Late for Roses is up and live on Pandora.com. Check us out over at our Pandora page.
The process changed from a couple of years ago – then you could just send music directly to Pandora (no pre-qualification required), and eventually they’d let you know if you got ‘in’. It’s worth pointing out that Pandora is fairly picky – they need to keep the quality of the less-known artists high enough so that when they mix them in with (say) Death Cab for Cutie, the listener isn’t repulsed by the crappy song that came on AFTER Marching Bands of Manhattan and bails out of the site altogether.
Now, you have to get your CD available for physical sale on Amazon.com, with a valid UPC (bar-code). CDBaby.com is probably the best way to do this, plus get your stuff on iTunes and virtually all the other sales channels. Then and only then you can submit a couple of songs at http://submitmusic.pandora.com/ , and wait to hear if you got the green light.
[ This is a convoluted way of saying “we feel pretty” that Pandora deemed us worthy. Whee! Let’s give our mastering guy, Joe Gastwirt some of the credit too. ]Now the interesting stuff happens – it’ll be fascinating to see how Pandora compares to the new nerds on the block, i.e. thesixtyone.com, jango.com, spotify.com etc. My sense from chatting with random folks around town (“hey dude – is your band on pandora yet?”) and from seeing the number of restaurants / clubs that use Pandora on a netbook for background music (BTW – does ASCAP/BMI just freak out about that or what?) is that Pandora has crossed the tipping point from being a niche site that nerds know about to a site that regular civilians know about and more importantly, use.
If true, we should see an up-tick in site visits, listens, downloads, and (who knows) sales. It’s cool that Pandora has the buy-now link on each song played.
So, getting on Pandora is a long, fairly demanding process. But…it’s a big audience.
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