Perhaps feeling a bit left out while rival music discovery service Pandora gets all the press, Melodeo is trying to turn the spotlight to its nuTsie personalized radio service by issuing a challenge to Pandora users.
Try the nuTsie service for a day, the company asks, and then vote on which service is better at a website set up for the contest – www.nutsiechallenge.com. The contest will run through the end of October.
Should nuTsie lose, Melodeo VP of marketing Dave Dederer, a former member of the Grammy winning band The Presidents of the United States of America, promises to write a “witheringly sincere” love song to Pandora founder Tim Westergren and post it on the nuTsie home page for a week. Pandora is free to reciprocate as they please.
“We think we blow away the competition,” said Dederer in a statement. “Pandora was early to market and so lots of people know about them, but I find the service really unsatisfying. We have better song recommendations, a playlist builder, more music, more discovery, more mobile… just plain more.”
He also took a shot at Pandora’s fight to lower the royalty fees set for streaming Internet radio services.
“I’m hearing Tim Westergren complaining in the press about royalty payments to artists being the straw that will break his back,” he said. “I’m an artist and I want to get paid. nuTsie’s paying just like Pandora, and we see a bright future.”
Melodeo continued the jabs at Pandora, saying the challenge idea was a result of an internal company think tank called The Music Gnome Project, an obvious pun on Pandora’s Music Genome Project which is the core of Pandora’s personalized radio system.
Stand by for updates on Pandora’s response, if any.
