Boom!

I read about Jango this morning via our Tunecore account and immediately drafted a strongly negative post, but after taking a deep breath and thinking about it more, I’m reconsidering.

At first the idea of paying someone to play your songs on internet radio is borderline offensive (as if giving it away for free weren’t enough!), but as a marketing expense, it’s not a terrible idea.

In fact, it dawns on me that this is analogous to Google Adwords for music.

As a prospective artst (RRR), my immediate questions are:

• How big is the listening audience?
• How can I reach fans with my existing newsletter or other forms of marketing?  (Contacting them only through Jango is not terribly helpful.)
• How scalable is the method of self-selecting similar artists?  (We can’t all sound like a handful of top artists.)  AdWords uses some sophisticated algorithms for ranking ads from numerous advertisers that want to be associated with certain keywords; this will eventually need something similar, à la Pandora’s music genome.
• Speaking of which, how does this compare to submitting your music to Pandora and getting paid in their rotation (for free)?