Peter Kafka:

Kennedy also dismissed concerns about Apple’s impending iTunes Radio launch, which will directly compete with his service. This one would be easier to take at face value if Pandora’s PR machinery wasn’t working so hard to downplay Apple’s entry.

But, for the record, Kennedy repeated the lines he has always used to describe competition in the past. “We’ve now been around for eight years. We’ve seen competitors large and small enter the market and, in some cases, exit the market,” he said. “I’ve never seen an analysis that identifies an effect from any competitor … we don’t see the picture changing.”

Yet Pandora is removing the 40 hour listening limit for mobile users two weeks before Apple introduces iTunes Radio. Pandora may not have seen any effect from previous competitors, but they’ve never faced Apple before.

BlackBerry, Nokia and Microsoft never thought they’d see any effect from Apple either. You see where that got them.