The free ride ended yesterday for beta testers of the Pandora music service. A friendly e-mail from the founder, Tim Westergren, encouraged me to subscribe.

I did. Pandora is really great. I can't remember when I've been so excited by a Web tool, or so willing to pay to keep it. I paid the $36 required for a year's subscription, and spent the afternoon listening to my personal radio channels.

I also saw my Dad today, and gave him a copy of 40 by Larry Sparks -- a CD I might never have discovered without the Pandora service.

I would love to see Apple license the Music Genome Project data and fold it into iTunes. The current "buy this song from iTunes" feature in Pandora is hit and miss -- it doesn't know whether Apple has the song, or if I can buy it from the Canadian store. A partnership with Apple could make this data available.

For now, though, I should probably be grateful that this doesn't work. Pandora's music discovery smarts plus iTunes one-click ordering would be very bad for my already smoking credit card.