Pandora...Competition for Apple??

Every night when I come back to my dorm room, my California roommate has Pandora blasting out of her computer. Being the technology-challenged bookworm from Wisconsin, I had never heard of Pandora before. Pandora is an online site that allows you to choose stations that only play certain genres. If you like rap, there’s an all rap station. To be difficult, I thought it’d challenge the system by saying that I like only Lil Wayne rap. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there is a station that plays only Lil Wayne music.
When you enter the Pandora website, you type in a band or genre type and it pulls up stations and related bands that you might be interested in. Being the picky person that I am, I personally get frustrated with Pandora because more times than not I don’t like the bands they pick out, but that’s just me. The normal people of the world seem to be fascinated by Pandora and it’s ability to read our minds.
Pandora seemed to be doing well, until the launch of a similar site called lala. As soon as you enter the lala page, a list of popular songs pops up and you can click on them to listen and it also shows new releases that came up in the past week. To be honest, its layout is a lot like iTunes, which makes sense because Apple and lala are working together. On the left side of the page, specific genres are listed. In my first interaction with the site, it has already blown my mind more than Pandora because I can actually pick and choose each song that I want to listen to…and I don’t have to pay $1.29 per song on iTunes.
While radio is still popular in cars, it had been dwindling in a social environment. Thanks for sites like Pandora and lala, this might all be changing. The only thing on my mind is why would Apple partner with a company that could potentially be their competition? Do they see Pandora as that much as a threat? Or do they just want to keep up with technology? Oh well, I’m not worrying about it for now…let’s just enjoy the free music!