Free Pandora Listeners The Party's Over, At Least For Now: Website's CTO Calls New Paywall "Counter To Mission"

Customized online radio provider Pandora announced last month that it would begin charging fees to listeners who exceed 40 hours of free listening within a month.

Pandora users will be forced to pay $1 to resume normal free Pandora listening for the remainder of the month-long period, as part of the newly enacted paywall, accorinding to laptopmag.com.

Pandora CTO Tom Conrad feels the move to a paywall goes against the company's core philosophy.

"[It's] counter to our mission," Conrad told Billboard Magazine at Monday's SXSW Interactive at the Austin Convention Center in Texas.

The Pandora CTO says he hopes the company reverses the paywall as revenues from mobile users continue to improve.

"The real story is that Pandora is a mobile phenomenon," Conrad said. "People want to take their music with them throughout the day and that's how the vast majority of our users experience the service."

Pandora's competition for online streaming radio continues to increase-last year online music provider Spotify added radio service, Apple and Google are allegedly developing similar technology.

But Conrad brushes off Pandora's competition as nothing new.

"There's a tendency for people to talk as if Pandora has never faced competition before and all of a sudden here comes this new entrant that's going to take the wind out of our sails," The Pandora CTO said. "But the fact is that when we started, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL were the giants of Internet radio. Since then there has been imeem and Playlists.com and MySpace and Last.fm. We slowly eroded their market share to become the biggest in the business."