Sad Pandora News
Our family is a heavy user of Pandora. I use it most of the day at work, Bec uses it a lot of the day and it is on pretty much till we head off to bed at night (dinner, relaxing, etc). So I was saddened when I read the news today on the Pandora Blog that Pandora will being capping usage at 40 hours for free accounts.
If you didn’t know, Pandora has been in fights with the music industry for years about royalties. According to the blog post they finally came to an agreement with the music industry. Unfortunately the fees Pandora has to pay are higher than normal radio.
Going forward you can pay (or “tip”) $.99 if you hit 40 hours in a month to get the rest of the month activated or pay $36/year for Pandora One. So will this change how you listen to radio? Will you just use multiple accounts? I’ll wait and see but I use Pandora enough that I can tip $.99 if I hit 40 hours.
The bigger problem is that the music industry is still trying to get money any way that it can instead of going with a model (like noisetrade.com) that work harder at connecting artist with their fans. I have no problem buying music directly form an artist or paying for their shows. I’m just tired of paying the middle man.