For those who use Pandora.com on a regular basis, a sad e-mail was sent out today regarding the future of the service. Starting this month, Pandora will start capping online listening to 40 hours per month.

While we did the best we could to lower the rates, we are going to have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the web.

- Tim Westergren, Founder Pandora

For those of us who may listen at work, or enjoy setting up a playlist for a night of drinking, 40 hours a month is fairly easy to get to. That would work out to about 1 hour a day on average, or the equivalent of 15 songs (or drilling down even further, about 1 CD per day). With Pandora One charging 36 bucks for a year subscription it appears to be quite the deal. Lets break it down.

With Pandora One you can stream unlimited hours of music commercial and ad free for 1 year. For that same $36 you can buy 36 singles on iTune, or 4 or 5 albums at Target. With $36 dollars you could also buy one brand new Blu Ray at retail price (something I strongly discourage – get them on sale at amazon.com, but thats a different blog)

If you are a Pandora addict like me, it would be worth looking into this subscription service. While there are many alternatives to Pandora, there is just something about how it all comes together with this service which is why I always keep coming back.

Of course, we can still hold out and hope they remove the cap and continue to offer the same great service and find new ways to make money. If you are interested in finding out more about Pandora One, head on over to http://www.pandora.com/pandora_one