Pandora Caps Listener Hours for Free Version
Posted July 17, 2009 – 17:00 in: Silivrenion, syndicated
The popular radio music site Pandora released a notice today indicating that they are switching their policies on free audio play to limit user accounts to 40 listener hours a month. Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora released the statement to listeners who have statistically listened to pandora for more than 40 hours per month. “We’ve reached a resolution to the calamitous Internet radio royalty ruling of 2007. After more than two precarious years, we are finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates – thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our listeners who voiced an absolute avalanche of support for us on Capitol Hill. We are deeply thankful.”
Pandora is a flash-based website offering customized audio playback stations based on a target song or genre of your choice. It uses Music Genome Project technology to find songs that best match your search criteria.
“Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising alone… the combination of our usage patterns and the “per song per listener” royalty cost creates a financial reality that we can’t ignore.”
Pandora is offering two pay-options to alleviate the audio dilemma:
- Listen free until you reach 40 hours, then pay a one-time $0.99 fee to continue playing music for the rest of the month.
- Upgrade to Pandora One, the premium version of Pandora. This gives unlimited listening, a desktop application, personalized skins, 192kbps streams, and more for $36/year, or $3/month.
Pandora will be adding a listener hour counter to their site to allow you to see your current usage. They recommend the use of the pause button when you’re not listening to save listener hours.
It is unclear how this change will affect listenership or advertisement revenues for the popular music site, but speculations are that Pandora may loose steam from the change as competing services take listener counts away.
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