The world"s most popular online radio service, Pandora, has been struggling to pay for its online radio royalty fees and now, to survive, Pandora has added 15-second ads between songs.
Pandora is known for being the radio station that is highly customizable and caters to your tastes with help from the Music Genome Project. Since it"s creation, Pandora has been a free service available on the Internet and then recently on the iPhone. There were originally only a few ads, and those came from the Web page. And now they have been injected into the actual audio.
The Daily Geek has reported that an ad plays after 10 songs, and then again after 20, and only for some users. "The fears people have about it overtaking the listening experience are unfounded," said Pandora founder and CEO Tim Westergren in a phone interview with the Press Democrat on Tuesday. "It"s going to be a fraction of what you hear on broadcast radio."