Anyone with a computer at home has heard of Pandora Mobile and everyone with a Smartphone knows about the Pandora Mobile app. Pandora Radio is a personalized online radio program that allows the user to choose their own track of music to be played based on a genre or enter a favorite song/artist and Pandora will play songs that are similar. In addition, the user can like or dislike songs that come up so that Pandora will continuously learn the user's likes to better choose songs for that track. Smartphone users have enjoyed the benefits of this program for free as long as they don’t skip or dislike too many songs in the course of an hour. Pandora will limit your skips/dislikes after a while if you only have the free version, but at least the listening has been unlimited. Well, not anymore.
As with many consumer products, prices go up and so do charges. Pandora Mobile, while free to the average user, still has to pay royalties to artists and copyright holders for every song played on its program. That means Pandora must have some users that actually pay to listen to the add-free version to pay for these costs. As a result, Pandora has released notice that their mobile app will be limited to 40 hours of music a month for each user. With this new change, Pandora anticipates that only approximately 4% of users will be affected since the average listener only plays approximately 20 hours of Pandora Radio a month.
This change is not uncommon and not surprising in the entertainment industry where prices can increase exponentially. So unfortunately this will probably not be the last time that Pandora has to make changes or limit the mobile or computer based program.
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