It looks like Pandora is going to survive after all, albeit with some concessions due to royalty issues for online radio. From the Pandora blog:
The revised royalties are quite high – higher in fact than any other form of radio. As a consequence, we will have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners.
The gist of the changes is that accounts are limited to 40 hours per month of listening. If you go over 40 hours, you can pay $0.99 (yes, less than 1 dollar), for unlimited listening for that month. Overall, I can live with that, as long as it is not a slippery slope of upcoming charges. I might even look into Pandora One.
My usage of Pandora has picked up over the last 6 months with my purchase of an iPhone and Sonos adding support for the online music service. Pandora is basically my own private radio station. It is my most used iPhone app so I might actually use Pandora for more than 40 hours. We’ll see.
Wed, Jul 8, 2009
Sonos