Streaming radio service Pandora announced on Thursday that it will introduce a cap on mobile listening due to rising royalty rates.

Pandora founder Tim Westergren wrote about the change in a company blog post that blamed increasing royalty licensing costs for the cap on mobile listeners.

"Pandora's per-track royalty rates have increased more than 25 percent over the last three years, including 9 percent in 2013 alone and are scheduled to increase an additional 16 percent over the next two years," Westergren said in the post. "After a close look at our overall listening, a 40-hour-per-month mobile listening limit allows us to manage these escalating costs with minimal listener disruption."

Mobile devices using Apple's iOS and Android are a few of the handsets that dominate the usage of Pandora by about 80 percent compared to about 20 percent of users that listen on a PC, according to PC Mag.

Pandora listeners who do not want to put up with ads or worry about hitting that cap could always upgrade to the premium Pandora One service, which costs $3.99 per month.

This is not the first time that the live stream music company instituted a listening cap. Pandora originally had a 40 hour usage cap for users on computers, but the company lifted the limit in fall 2011.

Company CEO Joe Kennedy was quoted by Tech Crunch saying the issue is simply that Pandora needs more money, but will continue to offer what free services it can.

"When you have a per-track royalty structure ... there's an inherent conflict between what radio has always been [namely, free] and what's pragmatically reasonable," Kennedy said. "We're trying to balance the two. We're certainly not backing down from the vision that we're the future of radio. As mobile monetization improves over time, we'll lift this."

Users will also have the option of listening to unlimited music via desktop.

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Pandora, Ios 6