I received the dreaded email from Pandora.com this past week detailing how they will soon be beginning to limit users to 40 hours of streaming music per month. If you want more than that, only $0.99 for the rest of the month. Or, you can have uncapped, high quality, uninterrupted music with no ads for a mere $36 per year. As a bonus, they’ll throw in a desktop application, so you don’t even need to have a browser open to enjoy the music.

40 hours a month sounds like a lot of music, and it is. However, I always have Pandora on in the background while I’m at work and much of the time whilst at home cooking, browsing the interwebs, or working on my bike. Apparently that puts me in the 10% bracket of users that normally exceed this 40 hour cap.

When Pandora introduced audio ads intermixed with your songs a few months ago, it began to frustrate me (likely because they were all the same commercial, from the US Govt about traveling to Canada). I said to myself I would gladly pay a small amount per month to listen to Pandora ad free, and others probably would as well. At the time, I didn’t know about Pandora One.

Now that they are forcing my hand, I have gladly signed up for the Pandora One service and it has so far been wonderful. High quality streaming music with desktop applications running on my Mac at work, and on my Vista Laptop and Ubuntu Desktop at home!

If you are having difficulty installing the Pandora One application on linux, see this post about properly setting up the Adobe Air installer.

Overall, I think more companies should follow the model that Pandora has decided to take. You will likely fail if you try and force all of your users to switch over to subscription only, but many of your users would prefer to pay a small premium to utilize your service without the advertisements (with some bonuses to boot!). Sometimes ads just don’t pay the bills for your heaviest users, and this is a fantastic way to solve that problem.