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Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
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Pandora will begin limiting mobile listeners to 40 hours of free listening per month, the company revealed in a blog post today. The change was made in response to a rise in the royalty rates that the company must pay to record companies.

Users who wish to listen to more than 40 hours per month can subscribe to the Pandora One service and get unlimited listening, as well as no advertising -- or pay a one-time $0.99 fee to listen as long as they like for the rest of the month. Desktop users can continue to listen to unlimited music.

pandora.jpg
Most of you reading this will never hit the limit. In fact, it will affect less than 4% of our total monthly active listeners. For perspective, the average listener spends approximately 20 hours listening to Pandora across all devices in any given month.

That said, limiting listening is a very unusual thing to do, and very contrary to our mission so we wanted to share a quick explanation. Pandora's per-track royalty rates have increased more than 25% over the last 3 years, including 9% in 2013 alone and are scheduled to increase an additional 16% over the next two years. After a close look at our overall listening, a 40-hour-per-month mobile listening limit allows us to manage these escalating costs with minimal listener disruption.
Pandora may come under increasing pressure from competitors over the next year -- Google and Apple are both rumored to be working on subscription-based music services, and Spotify is reportedly working to bring its free product to mobile devices.

Article Link: Pandora Limits Free Mobile Listening to 40 Hours Per Month
 

PantherCreek

macrumors regular
Jun 25, 2011
183
1
Dallas/Ft. Worth
So im paying for something and I can't listen to it unlimited... Looks like i'm not going to reup my payment.

Users who wish to listen to more than 40 hours per month can subscribe to the Pandora One service and get unlimited listening, as well as no advertising -- or pay a one-time $0.99 fee to listen as long as they like for the rest of the month.


If you're paying - you're getting unlimited uninterrupted music from Pandora.
 

OrangeSVTguy

macrumors 601
Sep 16, 2007
4,127
68
Northeastern Ohio
40+ hours via mobile is insane. Guess you better have an unlimited data plan. I will maybe listen to 3-4 hours a day at work when we are on a job with limited radio reception or interference. I wish I had unlimited data plan as I would probably listen to it every day.

I'd like to see Netflix add a music service since I already pay for that :p
 

Spectrum Abuser

macrumors 65816
Aug 27, 2011
1,377
48
So im paying for something and I can't listen to it unlimited... Looks like i'm not going to reup my payment.

Did you not read the second paragraph?

Users who wish to listen to more than 40 hours per month can subscribe to the Pandora One service and get unlimited listening, as well as no advertising -- or pay a one-time $0.99 fee to listen as long as they like for the rest of the month. Desktop users can continue to listen to unlimited music.

Besides. Pandora has had the forty hour limit in the past. They removed it back in 2011. It was bound to come back eventually.
 

alchemistmuffin

macrumors 6502a
Dec 28, 2007
711
591
Apple will probably have the streaming service free of charge, because it'll probably going to be part of iCloud, which is free.
 

xkmxkmxlmx

macrumors 6502a
Apr 28, 2011
885
113
can't you just login to a different account? or is it one account per device sort of deal.
 

Maddix

macrumors member
Jan 25, 2011
42
1
Something needs to scare XM and Sirius for their horrible 50 kbps sound quality. They need to get rid of channels and up the bitrate for better sound quality.
 

rorschach

macrumors 68020
Jul 27, 2003
2,266
1,831
Apple will probably have the streaming service free of charge, because it'll probably going to be part of iCloud, which is free.

More likely it'll be part of iTunes Match. "Stream all the songs you already own -- and now any song in the iTunes catalog."
 

GuitarDTO

macrumors 6502a
Feb 16, 2011
687
110
Something needs to scare XM and Sirius for their horrible 50 kbps sound quality. They need to get rid of channels and up the bitrate for better sound quality.

Agreed! I have vehemently tried to get my wife to dump Sirius XM. Terrible sound quality from their app, terrible channel selection, poor pricing and even worse customer service.
 

nagromme

macrumors G5
May 2, 2002
12,546
1,196
I never even realized the old 40 hour limit had ever been lifted! And I never hit that limit before so I won't now.

So this was non-news to me.

One thing I like about the limit, actually: I calculated how much data 40 hours would be on cellular: much less than than my data plan. So I can feel free to listen to Pandora ALL the time in the car, knowing that it will run out before my megabytes do. (But it never runs out. Still--peace of mind.)

Apple will probably have the streaming service free of charge, because it'll probably going to be part of iCloud, which is free.

iTunes Match is not free, though.
 

zorinlynx

macrumors G3
May 31, 2007
8,133
17,434
Florida, USA
Something I've always wondered...

Why is mobile listening treated differently than desktop listening? For instance, Spotify free lets you do more listening on a desktop than a phone.

Many YouTube videos, particularly songs, cannot be viewed on mobile devices.

I've always wondered about this; it's the same data, it's the same person seeing the same content, just on a different device. Why differentiate?
 

ziggyonice

macrumors 68020
Mar 12, 2006
2,385
1
Rural America
Blame this on politics.

Regular, terrestrial radio (like what you listen to in your car) pays NOTHING for royalties to play the music you hear.

But for some asinine reason, Internet radio is required to pay substantial royalty fees — that's why Pandora is the most successful out of all of 'em, because no one else could afford it. When Pandora lobbied to Congress to try and get the same opportunities as terrestrial radio, their efforts were torn apart. Lawmakers actually suggested increasing the amount Pandora has to pay.

Absolutely ridiculous.
 

MrDc2

macrumors regular
Jan 6, 2013
138
0

no you chill, okay? Thank you.

...I just tried to type in all caps and it..edited me..FAIL!
 
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