The gist of the site is that it is a music discovery service. You create stations by typing in songs or artists that you like, and using the work done by the Music Genome Project, it finds songs that are similar and plays them. It is a really great way to discover new music.

However, since its conception, it has just been running into various roadblocks, mainly financial ones.

Since I’ve discovered it a few years ago and was happily listening to really interesting and new music that I have never discovered before, the service has been blocked to be accessed by just those in the US due to licensing issues, which means that if I am to go and listen to Pandora, I’ll need to make use of proxy servers in the US.

Now apparently the US has doubled the cost of Internet-based royalties and Pandora is reportedly close to having to pull the plug on the service soon.

Really unfortunate situation here, because Pandora is a really awesome service that I am pretty sure helps expose people to new music that they would actually like instead of all that mainstream crap on the media nowadays.

I just hope that Pandora doesn’t have to shut down. However, if it does, that’s just another stab in the foot of the music industry, done so by those organizations like the RIAA who claim to represent these artists. Pandora getting killed off is essentially killing off ways for obscure, yet potentially talented, musicians to be exposed to a fairly large audience, which would simply mean less exposure for these struggling artists and more exposure (to fill in the gaps) for the crap that’s out there nowadays.