Pandora—an online personalized radio station—has signed a deal with Sprint to make the service available to the carrier’s customers. “Pandora is offering to stream radio stations on a number of Sprint handsets via pre-installed or downloaded software (take your Sprint phone browser to Pandora.com and you will be prompted to download the client),” reports TechCrunch. There’s a 30 day free trial and then the subscription costs $3 per month, which also removes ads from the Pandora website—there’s no mention if the streaming data is included in Sprint’s plans or not standard PowerVision data charges apply. Pandora and other web broadcasters were hit hard by recent increases in the licensing fees for web broadcasters and aren’t pleased with the music industry’s suggested solution. They’ve also been prevented from offering the service to people outside the US. The mobile venture at least gives Pandora an extra revenue stream…Pandora claims 6.9 million registered listeners who have played 4.7 billion songs and voted up or down half a billion times.

AP: “The service will work initially on five phone models but will expand to all high-speed data phones sold by Sprint by the end of June”. Pandora founder Tim Westergren is also quoted as saying that if the new royalty scheme stays then the business no longer makes sense.

UPDATE: Sprint’s release has come out…“Sprint customers can bookmark a song, and the song name and artist will be saved. The bookmark can serve as a reminder to purchase the song later on the Sprint Music Store, which offers more than 1.6 million songs that can be downloaded wirelessly on the phone in as little as 30 seconds for only 99 cents each with a Power Vision data plan.”