Dont Click

http://www.dontclick.it/

We’ll miss you Pandora

Well as we were all expecting the end of Pandora is drawing near in the UK. Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora has issued an email notification of the impending blocking of UK IP's to the Pandora website after negotiations between Pandora and the various alliances and organizations that pretend to protect the music industry push impossible to meet royalty costs on the playing of free to listen web radio. It was an astounding project that got me through a lot of dull times with the fast streaming of quality music. This is a prime example of a service that had found a solution to free music without the need to pirate and now that it's gone, I guess I'll go steal again. The following email is what Tim circulated:

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hi, it's Tim,

This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

Based upon the IP address from which you recently visited Pandora, it appears that you are listening from the UK. If you are, in fact, listening from the US, and are denied access from Pandora on or after January 15th please contact Pandora Support: pandora-support@pandora.com.

It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don't often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent - and by that I mean both well known and indie artists. The only consequence of failing to support companies like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans. As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling.

We have been told to sign these totally unworkable license rates or switch off, non-negotiable...so that is what we are doing. Streaming illegally is just not in our DNA, and we have to take the threats of legal action seriously. Lest you think this is solely an international problem, you should know that we are also fighting for our survival here in the US, in the face of a crushing increase in web radio royalty rates, which if left unchanged, would mean the end of Pandora.

We know what an epicenter of musical creativity and fan support the UK has always been, which makes the prospect of not being able to launch there and having to block our first listeners all the more upsetting for us.

We know there is a lot of support from listeners and artists in the UK for Pandora and remain hopeful that at some point we'll get beyond this. We're going to keep fighting for a fair and workable rate structure that will allow us to bring Pandora back to you. We'll be sure to let you know if Pandora becomes available in the UK. There may well come a day when we need to make a direct appeal for your support to move for governmental intervention as we have in the US. In the meantime, we have no choice but to turn off service to the UK.

Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.

Again, on behalf of all of us at Pandora, I'm very, very sorry.

ß

Lost Planet

Again, another award winner from Horizon. Again, nothing too splendid. I can appreciate that the best approach to creating a game website is to imitate the game itself in style, of which most achieve. However I don't think it needs to be done in such a bog standard manner. It may well come down to budget but I don't think this is any excuse to keep on churning out website's that are quite literally identical bar a style switch, which is very reminiscent of just switching to a different CSS style on a template.

This website is very similar in style to the EA Game's release "Battlefield: 2142". The thing that I quite liked about this website was it's thermal indicator. Basically this is a part of the website that encourages the user to boost his 'thermal energy levels' by looking through the website. Once your 'levels' have reached a high amount you get to see something or other.
However with the website seemingly not loading 90% of the time and there being no way of reloading previous pages I got stuck with loading bars almost all the time and so gave up. This idea however was a great plan to get users to fully explore a website that they might otherwise move along from quite soon.

Civ City: Rome

This computer game that will be released shortly hired a team of designers who go by the name ROKKAN to create a promotional website for the game. They won an award for their website in the Horizon best Flash website category.

I'm wonder why though. The website doesn't offer any new approach to creating a Flash based game website. This is a very standard affair with nothing any more interesting than a few dozen others that I've seen.

Again though we find ourselves waiting silly times for content to load. I just can't seem to find justification for the load times on this website as there isn't all that much to see after each loading period.

This is the typical loading bar, a pillar being constructed. You get to see this a lot on this Flash website.

I do quite like the background movement going on, for instance in this shot the people are building on the left hand side of the screen whilst you read about the game contents.

OK so while the website isn't fantastic at any stretch of the imagination it does look all very professionally created with a very unified style that seems to tie in perfectly with what the game itself offers. This maybe exactly what they were after, but it all just reminds me of the old Age of Empires website + game which makes the entire product look dated and as if it offers nothing new.

Medieval Total War

While the Civ City may not have created a very impressive website there only seems to be two main approaches to creating game website's. Either a very heavily Flash orientated approach or in my opinion the much more desirable HTML website with Flash to back it up visually. A good example of this would be the Medieval Total War website. Although it's not a stunning example of interactive design is achieves perfectly a highly and easily updatable website that visually is more than enough.

You also see a lot less loaders on this example. What content does need some loading is also content that isn't essential to the viewing of the website. This is my preferable direction in a website.

BMW Transact

I love the clear design and simple layout of this website. Ever increasingly I've come to realise less is more. With all this web 2.0 interactivity and design I really feel the website's that speak to me the most are those which don't try to bombard me with choices.

On a different note I found the loading times of this website very annoying. Everything was a quick simple flash website with little to load but the main content, which were high res videos. Videos that, for their size, needn't be quite so high res.

Boost Mobile Rock Corps

Although this website was very busy it managed well to keep itself coherent. The duel Flash, HTML design worked well and complimented each other well which isn't too often.

This website must take a lot to keep updated and in terms of faults I found the fact it reloaded itself whenever a HTML link was clicked quite annoying but the load times weren't bad and the important information was there first to be viewed.

The visual styling of the website wasn't anything ground breaking but it managed to stay consistent and seemed to fit the content and the style of writing perfectly.

Jelly Jumper

This is a website that Mule showed me earlier. It's to market the Logitec keyboards via a fun game that lets you take control of a jelly man and gets you to jump around a keyboard onto coloured keys. It's actually really good fun for such a simple game. But simple things done well are often the best things. As I've said in prior posts, simple and well done is best. In projects I often complicate things too much for myself and then in the end I always have a good idea which hasn't quite reached it's full potential. I'm trying to train myself to take on less and achieve more. This is a prime example of that ethic.

NTH Degree FX

I came across this design team whilst surfing a good design website of which I can't recall the name. However It was strange for me to find this design group with an online portfolio that didn't match the level of their work. This group, NTH, create high end business websites. However, they're own portfolio was very poor in comparison. The quality of work looked rushed and somewhat low grade with some dodgy and plain animations and a very mediocre style Flash site. However they had a nice style going as can be seen in this from the site.


Some of the groups they've worked for are Disneyland:


And the Hard Rock Hotel:


However the design team, using their portfolio site, do demo their work well with some nice demo reels dedicated to individual projects.