Pandora, my previously favorite site until the music industry blocks it from the rest of the world might consider to shut down or discontinue their service. While the music industry thinks that they are making the right decision by taxing internet radio, they didn’t realize that these internet radio are actually doing them a big favor of slowing down the pirate scene. Now if pandora, which is considered as one of the biggest internet music site, will shut down, imagine where those people will find their music? Some will find other services that are like pandora, but most of them will return to being a pirate.

The music industry don’t know that they face more opponent now then before, previously they only have to face p2p and music downloading sites. Now they need to oppose p2p, torrents, file sharing sites like rapidshare and megaupload, video ripping site like vixy.net, sharing files via instance messaging, sending music files via mail (gmail,yahoomail), passing files through bluetooth, sharing memory sticks full of mp3s (used to be cds), forums, mp3 searches like baidu.com, etc. Now how the heck could they battle all of that?

People will pirate when they don’t have alternatives (this is my reason why i switch to linux) and not when they just want to. Pandora is a good alternative that they will kill and when that happens its the music industry will suffer not the listeners.

Read more http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/16/perhaps-pandora-must-be-our-sacrificial-lamb/