Pandora Lifting 40-Hour Monthly Free Mobile Listening Cap So You Can Gorge On Show Tunes

Maybe you love that guy in a fedora who plucked your heart strings in college, along with the rest of his behatted ilk, or you can’t help belting along to the best of Les Miserables. Sometimes when you love a genre of music so much, 40 hours of listening just isn’t enough. Rejoice, then, Pandora users: The company is planning on lifting its 40-hour free monthly mobile listening cap. Pandora set that cap back in February, dismaying many listener and inviting plenty of pouts.

As TechCrunch notes, if this seems like a miraculous reversal, it isn’t that out of place for Pandora — the company instituted a free cap before and then lifted it again, back in September 2011.

The news of this most recent cap-lifting exercise came on an earnings call yesterday, where CFO Mike Herring said it came about because basically, Pandora wants to have a lighter hand with users. Smart. See, caps are more of a “blunt tool” for limiting usage and thus, keeping costs down, where the company prefers more “surgical techniques” that can get a grip on costs without ruffling users so much.

The company also has had some luck in the advertising business, which means Pandora can now “monetize those hours from 41 onward at a much higher rate.”

So wait, if companies get more money, some of them actually turn around and pass on that satisfaction to customers? Weird. But good for fans of guys in fedoras singing about whatever it is they sing about.

Pandora Plans To Lift Its 40-Hour Free Mobile Listening Cap On Sept. 1 [TechCrunch]

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