There are untold fortunes to me made in this world, as long as you live by one cardinal rule: never underestimate the laziness of consumers. This is the guiding logic behind a new "intuitive" mp3 player launched by the Slacker Company. Slacker and their new gadget called... The Slacker (creative, no?) are set to be available in June and cost around $150 for a 2 Gig model, and $400 for 12 Gigs. The real innovation is that the player chooses music automatically, and allows you to decide if you like it or not. If you say you don't, it'll never play the song again. Many internet radio users will be familiar with this format. Mainly because it's taken directly from internet radio. Slacker's internet radio has been operating since March, and has 100 stations which will is where the songs for the mp3 player will be downloaded from.

In a wonderful testament to just how lazy we've become as a society, one of the founders of Slacker was quoted as saying "Most MP3 players are too much work for the average user." Valid point. Many of us lay tired and sore in our beds at night after a long day of handling our Mp3 players. Medical experts have recently reported a high rate of chronic fatigue among young Americans and feel that portable music players are to blame, even going so far as to dub the trend "Ipod Drain". Poor attempts at humor aside, the Slacker does seem like a useful tool. A portable radio with just enough control over the playlist that you can be sure to get something you like, while trimming out that which you don't. And more importantly, now that we don't have to spend so much time and effort slaving away on our old fashioned MP3 players, we as a society can finally get around to getting some work done.

Pandora is a music discovery service we've covered before. It goes beyond "regular" internet radios, who largely base their taxonomy and discovery services on rather flat databases and sterile genre/artist/album nomenclature. At best, you might get web-based social suggestions, like what built MySpace and makes Virb sing. Pandora utilizes the research and ongoing classifications of the Music Genome Project to suggest songs similar to the ones you already enjoy.

The Music Genome project is a story in itself, but Pandora uses real, live musicians to dissect songs and analyze their pieces and parts, organizing that data in such a way that, frankly, makes it a little scary to use Pandora regularly. Once you "seed" a radio station with an artist (something you can try on their homepage for free without even registering), subsequent songs are based on the style of that original artist (and the random song chosen by Pandora from said artist). You can give a simple thumbs up or down to indicate your song preferences as each new song plays.

A provision in the DMCA allows Pandora to play these songs, almost every released song out there. They really make an effort to grab the long tail and most of their songs, once you start just listening, are not well-known. You can't rewind or even go back, due to the restrictions of the DMCA, but you can order the songs from Amazon or iTunes as you listen. All together, Pandora is a remarkable service for a "simple" internet radio service.

But a ruling from an obscure, 3-person panel from the Library of Congress threatens the existence of Pandora, and every other internet radio service out there. The plan from the Copyright Royalty Board is to increase the fees to internet radio operators so high that they will effectively be out of business. Paying $.0008 a song might not sound much, but if you consider the millions of songs per day served up by Pandora alone, it becomes a very large bill indeed.

There is an appeals process, and those threatened are taking action. However, it might require legislative action. Ultimately it is puzzling why the RIAA (proponents of the onerous charges) would threaten a nascent industry in such a way. What's to gain? Web radio has no doubt spurred online music purchases, much as the radio generated (and continues to generate) wads of dough for the music biz.

We sat down with Tim Westergren, the man behind the Genome Project, and the founder of Pandora. In our interview, Tim explains the basic situation, and where some logic might prevail (we hope).