Its not often you get an email that starts “This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.” Kind of grabs your attention.
In this case it was from Pandora, the music recommendation engine which closed its station to anyone outside the US a while ago, but kept it open in the UK in the hope of resolving rights issues with the music labels. It hasn’t.
That’s a shame, because I think recommendation engines are a brilliant way to get you to buy music – if you find a new track you like you don’t just want to log onto your PC and navigate to a web page each time you want to listen to it, even if it is free. Surely Pandora is great viral marketing? Maybe I’m missing something…but for the moment I’m missing Pandora.
However, the rights issue doesn’t seem to work the other way round – even our own private conversations are now considered fair game for advertisers. Scarily, there is a new service being developed that will listen in to your phone calls made over the internet or mobile and display adverts based on keywords that pop up in the conversation. Perhaps people will invent a new code to get round this, talking only in words that cannot possibly have any advertising connected to them. Or perhaps advertisers will come to their senses and remember that it’s rude to interrupt.
