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I guess a one time fee of $0.99 isn't too much to ask. I do have over that with the change in my pocket from my two coffees I go this morning.

Pandora was available in Canada.

Piracy Tips for Consumers [riaa.com], I was reading the "royalty rates" link and saw that the RIAA was behind it, so I went to their website and found this jewel.
Of note: Watch for Compilations that are "Too Good to Be True". Why are they too good to be true? If customers would want that compilation why haven't you sold it to them?
Even better: Trust your ear: The sound quality of pirate CDs is often poor or inconsistent. It is a freaking digital copy, it is the exact same quality! Does anyone actually believe this stuff?

This comes on the same day that an agreement was announced [nytimes.com] that lowers royalty payments for internet radio stations. The original plan called for royalties of 0.19 cents per streamed song. The new plan sets royalties for large stations at 25% of revenue or .14 cents/song (whichever is greater). Small stations will pay $25,000/yr or 12-14% of revenue (whichever is greater). It sounds like it's still going to be impossible for individuals to set up stations as a hobby, which I guess it was practical to do at one point, but I'm guessing that a lot of college radio stations might find it cheaper to pay the $25k/yr than to maintain an FM broadcast station.

My primary concern with low-cost services, is that of transactional security. I don't want to expose my CC to compromise over only 1$. Paypal is just as bad. if I subscribe to 100 1$ services per month, how much does that increase my exposure, vs one transaction for 100$? low cost webservices may be the answer to making money online, but I'm not here so a provider can make a buck.

Here's the email I received from Pandora: Hi, itâ(TM)s Tim - I hope this email finds you enjoying a great summer Pandora soundtrack. Iâ(TM)m writing with some important news. Please forgive the lengthy email; it requires some explaining. First, I want to let you know that weâ(TM)ve reached a resolution to the calamitous Internet radio royalty ruling of 2007. After more than two precarious years, we are finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates â" thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our listeners who voiced an absolute avalanche of support for us on Capitol Hill. We are deeply thankful. While we did the best we could to lower the rates, we are going to have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the web. Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising alone. Most listeners will never hit this cap, but it seems that you might. We hate the idea of capping anyone's usage, so we've been working to devise an alternative for listeners like you. We've come up with two solutions and we hope that one of them will work for you: Your first option is to continue listening just as you have been and, if and when you reach the 40 hour limit in a given month, to pay just $0.99 for unlimited listening for the rest of that month. This isn't a subscription. You can pay by credit card and your card will be charged for just that one month. You'll be able to keep listening as much as you'd like for the remainder of the month. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable - the same price as a single song download. Your second option is to upgrade to our premium version called Pandora One. Pandora One costs $36 per year. In addition to unlimited monthly listening and no advertising, Pandora One offers very high quality 192 Kbps streams, an elegant desktop application that eliminates the need for a browser, personalized skins for the Pandora player, and a number of other features: http://www.pandora.com/pandora_one [pandora.com]. If neither of these options works for you, I hope you'll keep listening to the free version - 40 hours each month will go a long way, especially if you're really careful about hitting pause when youâ(TM)re not listening. Weâ(TM)ll be sure to let you know if you start getting close to the limit, and weâ(TM)ve created a counter you can access to see how many hours youâ(TM)ve already used each month. Weâ(TM)ll be implementing this change starting this month (July), Iâ(TM)d welcome your feedback and suggestions. The combination of our usage patterns and the "per song per listener" royalty cost creates a financial reality that we can't ignore...but we very much want you to continue listening for years to come. Please don't hesitate to email me back with your thoughts. Sincerely, Tim Founder

For folks who can't access Pandora, have a look at Spotify [spotify.com]. It's a similar idea to Pandora, but gives you more control over which tracks you listen to. I don't like it's "artist radio" as much as I like Pandora's stations/channels, but building playlists more than makes up for it. It runs in a client rather than a browser; works perfectly for me on Mac (10.4) and Kubuntu 8.10 (running inside WINE).

The one con relative to Pandora is that Spotify has audio ads; I've never counted but it's something like one 10 second ad every 10 songs. Not perfect, but much better than listening to a real radio station. On the upside, you can pay for a day or a month of ad-free listening.

There's also Magnatune [magnatune.com] which is a good source of DRM-free independant music. Not great as a radio station, as the free streaming is very basic, but I've got some good music from them.