I like Pandora and the employees are some of the nicest in the industry, but Pandora is going to drown with the royalties they must pay to record labels. Eventually companies like imeem and Pandora will run out of investor funding and the services will go silent.
At MP3tunes we built a Pandora-like system that won't get crushed by labels: PiMP (PlayMix Player). Similar to Slacker and Last.fm, users select an artist, genre or source song to select music they want to hear. But because PiMP uses songs from your own personal collection, you have complete control. PiMP allows rewind, unlimited fast forward, shows songs to be played next, and can play multiple songs from the same artist.
Apple proved the most important songs to you are the ones you already own — the average iPod had 1000+ songs with only 24 purchased from iTunes. The remaining 976 are from the personal library. PiMP can fill the void when net radio services are eventually put out of business.
--MR
