Thumbs Up! Scott Cooley music now on Pandora

Post date: Oct 27, 2019 2:14:43 PM

The popular Pandora streaming radio service recently decided to make some of my music available on their station/site/app. Out of all the popular places to get your music these days (Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon, etc.), it was the only holdout until now. For well over a decade now, you’ve been able to get my albums and songs as MP3 downloads in stores like iTunes or as CDs in stores like Amazon. Now Pandora has let me in their gate, and I suppose I am happy my current and future fans who use it can now find me there. Should Pandora consider themselves lucky to have the opportunity to take a cut when someone discovers and listens to my music on their service? Yes, I think so, of course!

I must’ve submitted my music to them at least five times in the last decade only to be denied, but finally, I’ve been approved and accepted by their curators. They seem to all of a sudden care about independent musicians, maybe because they got bought out by Serius XM satellite radio, but maybe as I like to think, I finally submitted the right music to them and I’ve gotten better! Call it radio-friendly or AI-friendly, science fiction fans know you have to appease the artificial intelligence of machines for future success.

The deal with them is they say they have 1) human curators, and 2) a genome algorithm thing, that both somehow decide whether to make your music available or not. The last time I did send them two of my most mainstream and commercial sounding songs from the Bluebird Days II album: “Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way” and “Mountain Time,” so maybe the radio-friendliness made a difference, who knows?

So, just thought I’d let people know that if they use Pandora, they can now find me on there. It could be a badge of honor since they’ve notoriously been annoyingly strict gatekeepers, but it could be they went after the major-label artists first, then got bought out, and then started to realize they could make even more money if they loosened their acceptance standards. Either way, I’ll get micro-fractions of fractions of a penny each time a subscriber hits play on one of my songs I guess, which I doubt will ever amount to an actual payment, but maybe if I get a check for a dollar ten years from now, it would make up for a miniscule fraction of my labor time in submitting my music to them.

Here’s a handy link: https://www.pandora.com/artist/scott-cooley/bluebird-days-2/AL55xcxpKZjc4vg