Taking a page from Slacker’s book, Internet music service Pandora is augmenting their paid service offerings with ad-supported streaming - think audio commercials. Thus far, home audio hardware (Sonos, Squeezebox) had required a subscription ($36/yr) for service. Now, a free ad-supported Pandora service offering is being made available as an option for the Squeezebox platform. Given the massive number of downloads, and presumably usage, of Pandora’s new iPhone application it’s probably a safe bet that we’ll see similar service models introduced at some point. Pandora’s got royalties to pay and quite a few of us are partaking - so I’m fine with them selling (a reasonable amount of) ads or charging me a modest fee for ad-free music.
