Pandora isn’t weighing an increase in the annual...

and Co. investor conference in New York. Pandora is considering a fee for a “small segment” of content or live streaming, charging for something that “creates a customized user experience,” Herring said. Most of Pandora’s 70 million listeners use the free music service, with about 2.5 million paying a $36 annual subscription fee. In releasing earnings last week, Herring left the door open to increasing the fee as a hedge against rising content costs (CD May 28 p10). Pandora paid 64 percent of fiscal Q1 revenue for royalty fees to musicians and copyright holders, the CFO said Wednesday. Pandora’s user interface is or will be available in 90 vehicles, the bulk of which will go on sale in 2014-2015, he said. About 10-20 percent of Pandora’s listeners access the service through smartphones connected to a vehicle’s Bluetooth or auxiliary jack, he said. With the arrival of Wi-Fi-equipped vehicles expected from General Motors and other automakers in 2015, Pandora will be more easily accessible, Herring said. In the first year of availability, wireless will likely have a “single-digit” percentage install base in vehicles, Herring said Wednesday. Pandora expects the number of users bumping up against the company’s 40-hour monthly limit on listening will remain “steady” at 3-4 percent of the total base, or about 3 million users in fiscal Q1, Herring told us. Heavy users went past the cap in “a matter of days” after Pandora started imposing the limit earlier this year, Herring said. In the cases where there were multiple users on a single account, Pandora worked to set up separate registrations to lessen some listeners’ chances of surpassing the monthly limit, Herring said. Pandora also is relying on when the service times out due to inactivity to help with avoid having users go over the limit, he said. The subscription-based service times out after three hours, while streaming ends after 1.5 hours of inactivity, Herring said. Pandora is adding software this week that allows users to monitor timeout settings, he said. Pandora, in seeking to increase ad revenue, may eventually seek to double the amount of audio spots that air with the service to three minutes per hour, against the 13-15 minutes common with broadcast radio, Herring said at the conference. “In the right context, certainly that’s a possible outcome.” Pandora has fully integrated Triton Digital’s national and local audience measurements with Strata’s and Media Ocean’s ad media planning and buying software, the latter having come on line in April.