I Hope That Pandora Doesn't Fold

Pandora.com is my favorite spot on the web for music. I hope that they are able to continue.

From Radio webcaster Pandora may have to pull the plug by Peter Whoriskey:

Pandora is one of the nation's most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple Inc.'s iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.

Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may others like it.

"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Tim Westergren, who founded Oakland-based Pandora. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."

The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has provoked a number of high-stakes fights between the owners of copyrighted works and the companies that can now easily distribute those works via the Internet.

The doomsday rhetoric these days around the fledgling medium of Web radio springs from just such tensions.

Read the rest here.