Pandora May Close
What is easily, to my mind, the best and most innovative music service on the Internet may be closing soon, as Pandora can no longer pay the royalty rates demanded by record labels. This is really too bad. I am a paying customer of Pandora (it is a free service on the Internet, but I pay $30 or $40 a year to listen to it on my Squeezebox streaming system at home).
I can say with total confidence that Pandora has caused me to buy more music than any other outside force has caused me to buy since my ill-fated flirtation with Columbia House when I was a teenager. I have gotten streams going that were so great that I had Amazon open in a second window, and was banging out CD orders almost as fast as Pandora could serve up tunes. I have thought for years that this would be a natural fit for Amazon or iTunes. Too bad the record labels can't understand this.
