Pandora Caps Mobile Listening, Cites Rising Royalties
Pandora has added a 40 hour per month limit to free mobile listening. In a post on the company blog, Pandora founder Tim Westergren blamed high royalty rates for the cap, and said it would impact less than 4% of their total monthly active listeners. The average listener spends approximately 20 hours on Pandora across all devices each month, according to the company.
"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," said Westergren.
For listeners who do hit the limit, Pandora offers a variety of options including unlimited free ad supported listening on desktop and laptop computers, $.99 for
unlimited listening for the remainder of that month, and subscriptions dubbed Pandora One for unlimited listening with no ads.
stop fucking complaining, pandora.
Or consumers will just switch over to one of the other dozen or so mobile streaming apps. The question for Pandora: with competition that fierce, is it worth risking that those consumers won’t come back when the month is over?