Layoffs at Internet companies continue to be announced, with the latest coming from Internet radio site Pandora. Pandora’s fate itself was in question not too long ago, but has recently found new hope and expects to survive after all.

There is new hope for Pandora and other webcasters, but any deal is far from done.

Pandora’s obituary was all but written last month as SoundExchange called for higher royalty payments from the Internet Radio site, and others like it. But there is a little life in the site and in the industry yet.

The other day I posted an article about Pandora’s probably upcoming demise as a result of a royalty rate hike put in place by SoundExchange, which represents record labels and the artists signed to them. If popular opinion around the ‘net is any indication, the issue is a lot larger than Pandora shutting down.

An Industry in Peril

Pandora.com, an Internet radio site that I am personally quite fond of is hitting a rocky patch (if you’re not familiar with Pandora, WebProNews recently chatted its CEO Tim Westergren, so check that out).

As the search engine world gets ready for its big-deal conference, Search Engine Strategies: San Jose in August, we tapped the deep intellect of Pandora CEO Tim Westergren for his thoughts on the future of search.

Music has to be one of the most social forms of content — most of us, even if we listen to our favourite music alone, like to talk about it, tell others what we like and why. That’s why things like Last.fm and Pandora are so popular (although I can’t use Pandora because I’m Canadian and they recently blocked us Canucks for licensing reasons).

In the spirit of the season – we’ve compiled a few things we are thankful for around here at Ignite.

Although I hate to jump on the whole “Day The Music Died” thing — which I think is a little over the top — I find it interesting that while a whole bunch of Web radio companies, including Yahoo Music and Pandora, are turning off their streams in order to protest the increase in licensing fees for Web broadcasting, Last.fm has decided not to, which has caused some consternation in the blogosphere, including this post at TechCrunch by Duncan Riley.

A Day of Silence has swept across the bandwidth of a number of music webcasting services as they protest new royalty rates that could put them out of business for good.

When Facebook — the social network everyone and their mom is on now — launched its new F8 “platform” initiative, one of the first to really take off was iLike.

Segregating your traffic by geographical location is a useful thing and is known in the search engine marketing circles as “geotracking”, but you could go one step further and target specific traffic based on geographical location using the cryptic practise known as “geotargeting”. But what happens when it’s used to block access to users based on their geography?

With all the bad news for music lovers being generated by Sony rootkits, RIAA file-sharing lawsuits, payola practices, and music industry pressure on iTunes pricing, Pandora.com stands out like a Little Walter harp solo in the dark.

I’ve been listening to Pandora all evening. Steve Gillmor thinks it’s not gonna be big. Sorry, Steve, this is awesome.

In the fall of 1990, the musical group Snap had a monster number one hit record called, “I’ve Got The Power.”