I just recieved a notice from Pandora via email informing me that I’m about to exceed 40 hours of listening this month.  I was shocked!  Not only because they want me to pay to keep using the service, but also because I just figured that I was using way more than that.  How did I miss this news 4 months ago?  I guess that I vaguely recall reading something about this and thinking about how tragic and sad it was.  Though I never thought it would affect me!

Perhaps its for the best for both of us.  I for one will be exploring other options with my listening time.  I’ve got a few leads on some internet radio stations outside the jurisdiction of the RIAA that I can squander a few hours a day on.  At $0.99 a month too keep the stream alive, I’m almost tempted to just bite the bullet reluctantly, but I won’t.  For $36 a year I ought to be able to pick the exact songs that I want to hear and repeat songs that I like among MANY other things.  For instance, there’s an echoing rumor that I’ll be able to subscribe to my favorite TV shows via iTunes inside of a year for about $30/month.  That I could get behind.  Pandora’s business model is a nice try, but ultimately its doomed to failure.

The real crux of my problem is that I (like many others) am philosophically opposed to the position taken by Pandora that followed the initial legal defeat.  What position is that?  ”If we have to pay ridiculously high fees to the RIAA then so should everyone else.” (paraphrased)  They were in such a fatalist, compromised position that they made a deal with the devil.  At this point, I’d like to thank Pandora for reminding me of this point so that I can take corrective action to avoid supporting them (and vicariously the greed-heads at the RIAA) in the future.  It’s for the best that they just fade into history.  Farewell, Pandora I hardly knew ye!

Does anyone know of any good alternative’s to Pandora that aren’t knee deal in slime from the RIAA?

The email from Pandora after the jump:

You Are Approaching Your Free Listening Limit

We wanted to let you know that you are approaching your monthly free listening limit. Pandora gives you 40 hours of free listening per month.
Why is free monthly listening limited?

If you’d like to listen more, you have three options. We hope that one of these works for you:

1. Pay 99 cents. Once you reach Pandora’s free monthly listening limit, the music will stop and you will be presented with an option to pay just 99 cents to continue unlimited listening for the rest of November. This is a one-time fee which requires a credit card, and it does not recur automatically.

2. Pay $36 to upgrade to Pandora One. For unlimited monthly listening as well as other cool features, you can upgrade to Pandora One for $36 per year.
Learn more about Pandora One

3. Pay Nothing. If neither of the above options is right for you, simply come back in December to start listening to your stations again.

The Pandora Team

Instructions

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Mine

“The two evildoers had tried to form a friendship in the past, but it had turned out like a great episode of Blind Date–they hated each other.” – From “Dude, Where’s My Country?” by Michael Moore

The fix is in.  In an incredibly bold move, the fed will bail out everyone.  Once again the little guy gets the screw job.  If there was any doubt before that the Bush administration didn’t truly believe in Capitalism let the skeptics take note.  This is Socialism for rich people.  It is the most shameful, dumb headed, and wrong action they could have taken.  Once again the Bush administration has paid off their croanies and pissed on everyone else.

Behold how quickly the goverment swoops in to assist the financial companies.  How much have they spent?  Some estimates place the number at $1 trillion.  Have you ever heard of such a silly rule as: no short selling of ONE kind of stock?  NO SHORT SELLING?!  WTF?!  That is so fundamentally flawed its hard to imagine investors ever having confidence in the financial system again.

“I don’t want to ban short selling, that is just horrible!” -Jim Cramer

“Whats happened here is that we’ve changed the rules in the middle of the game” -Art Hogan (Jefferies Managing Director)

In this early 2006 forum, Sir Ken Robinson gives an insightful talk on the role on education in our lives and how it should be changed to compensate for our evolving understanding of the education paradygm.

You’re welcome.