Back in February, Pandora introduced the 40 hour cap on free accounts and asked the user to pay 99 cents if the user wanted to continue listening to the Pandora radio. Pandora said that increasing royalty rates were making it difficult to keep the service afloat despite the advertising revenue.
In a recent earnings call, Pandora's CFO Mike Herring said that the strong advertising revenue has made up for the rising royalty rates though and that they'd listen to the critical insights from their user population by lifting this 40 hour cap.