By Lindsay Rothfeld

You’re listening to Earth, Wind, and Fire’s  “September.”  Next Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way” comes on. Why did this song just come on, you ask?  Well, based on what you’ve told Pandora so far, they’re playing this song because it features funk and disco influences, heavy use of vocal harmonies and acoustic rhythm piano. Oh, awesome.

Recently the entirety of consumer media has migrated from hard copies to the World Wide Web. With the rise in popularity of sites such as Hulu, Megavideo, YouTube, and Pandora, with a few clicks of our mouse we can easily enter the world of entertainment

What’s so enticing about Pandora is its accurate ability to pinpoint our musical desires and match our requested artist or song with something that shares similar qualities. Employees categorize about 700,000 songs according to 400 music qualities, for example, whether a voice is ‘breathy’ or if it has punk-rock aspects.

Pandora made $50 million in annual revenue last year and makes its money solely from advertisements and the few subscribers it has. Although its ads aren’t as intrusive as those on other stations, some consumers would rather pay a monthly rate than listen to a two-minute commercial. Furthermore, once a user reaches 40 hours of listening in a month, they will be required to pay 99 cents to get unlimited listening for the remainder of the month. Consider this for a moment. 99 cents can buy you only one song on iTunes, and only if that song is pretty outdated. But now, 99 cents allots you unlimited hours of online streaming with songs tailored to your likes and dislikes. Score!

And let’s not forget about video streaming, a media phenomena that has infiltrated our culture, especially on college campuses where students don’t have the freedom to watch their favorite shows live on television. Whether it’s on Hulu, which relies solely on sponsorship and advertisement much like Pandora, or MegaVideo, which is commercial-free and often infringes on copyrights, millions have decided to utilize their computer screens over their televisions.

Will websites like Pandora and Hulu alter the music and television industry as we know it? I think not. For those who listen to online radio streaming, most still have some kind of personal music library.  “When you listen to Pandora you don’t know what’s going to come on next, and when you crave a song, you want to listen to that specific song, not something that sounds like it,” Klosk noted.   And in terms of television, for the most part people usually prefer to watch television or movies on an actual screen. Even so, these novel websites are growing speedily…and who knows? We may be entering a new frontier.