Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may others like it.
We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision. This is like a last stand for webcasting.
Tim Westergren-founded Oakland-based Pandora
The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has provoked a number of high-stakes fights between the owners of copyrighted works and the companies that can now easily distribute those works via the Internet.
The doomsday rhetoric these days around the fledgling medium of Web radio springs from just such tensions. Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies. Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less expensive rate, at least by some measures.
