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I twizzizzled out the other day that I had bought Pandora one:

I’ve gotten a lot of questions as to what I like/don’t like/why I took the plunge and bought etc.

As I can’t – sadly – sum it up in 140 characters, here’s my rationale:

1. I was never that keen on Pandora – seemed like a novelty, and not deep enough for someone with as varied and erudite taste in music as mine (I keed, I keed). However, I found that by adding songs to the stations I created (rather than using artists alone to define the station’s parameters) it vastly broadened the spectrum.

2. The iPhone app, when combined with a direct connection into my car, makes for excellent “radio.” (As does the Wolfgang’s Vault iPhone app, by the way).

3. The integration into Boxee, made it accessible via my AppleTV.

4. The integration into my blu-ray DVD player made it accessible that way.

5. the release of the Squeezebox Boom
made it easy enough for my wife to use.

6. The Adobe Air powered “One” Service is REALLY nice. between the “growl“-like floating alerts, and the simple clean interface – it “just works.”

7. The price falls – in economic terms – into the category of “the importance of being unimportant.” While it’s nice not to have the ads, and the hour time out, I wouldn’t have paid for this if the price had been north of $50. At $36, that’s not even a crappy bottle of wine. For $50 I can get a decent bottle of wine.

So, as you can see from above, the main things that caused me to pull the trigger were the depth of music, and the integration into other things into my life.

This is an important point, and one I’ll blog about in more detail soon (I know, everyone’s on the edge of their Che’s Lounge).

Basically, what seems to be eluding people – be they those who produce musical content, film content, newspaper content, book content, or – really any other kind of content – is that the issue you have to contend with isn’t a content issue (of course, you’re content must be awesome or why bother – but everyone thinks their content is awesome), it’s a distribution issue.

The labels were the first to not learn this; had they more rapidly embraced new means of getting their content from creator/content holder to content user, life would have been much more bearable for them. Same deal, of course, for TV, movies, newspapers, etc.

Guess who’s next? Education. If colleges, etc. don’t start understanding that while they may very well be great content sources, if they need to grasp that those who will use their content don’t want to get it the same way Plutarch got his content, they’re cooked.

In any case, Pandora – via its myriad integration techniques – allows for the seamless distribution of its content into my life. That’s ultimately why I bought.

Some images of my Pandora One in action:

Now, what I want: The ability to link my Stitcher podcasts into Pandora. If I could do this, and have a news/Onion podcast come up every hour or so on Pandora…well, goodbye terr radio.