Music fans listened to Pandora’s internet radio service for a collective 1.47 billion hours in October, up 18 percent from a year ago, in the face of the launch iTunes Radio.
The figure, released by Pandora Media chief financial officer Michael Herring at an investor conference in the US on Monday, is Pandora’s second-highest monthly level. It had 1.49 billion hours in March, the last month before it imposed a 40-hour-per-month cap on free listening on mobile devices.
Pandora lifted the cap on September 1, two weeks before Apple launched iTunes Radio.
Pandora’s active listeners fell to 70.9 million from 72.7 million in September.
About a month after its mid-September launch, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said that 20 million people had used iTunes Radio to listen to more than a billion songs.
