It’s called Pandora Premieres, and the company says it’s a new way to discover music on the site.

Pandora Premieres lets users stream entire albums from both established and emerging artists for free. You can stream any track at any time, as many times as you like until the album is officially released. Pandora says that they will offer a new selection of upcoming albums each week, and some will come with additional exclusive content such as video interviews.

“Pandora Premieres is also a new and unique vehicle for artists, both established and emerging, to reach and expand their audience. Seeing the impact of Pandora on the careers of working musicians continues to be one of the most gratifying parts of this experience,” says Pandora’s Tim Westergren.

The service is kicking off today with John Fogerty’s new album Wrote of Song for Everyone and Laura Marling’s Once I was an Eagle. You can stream these albums, on-demand, for a week.

It’s unclear at this point what kind of albums Pandora will offer with Premieres. If they end up offering pre-streams of high-profile artists, it could be a great addition to the Pandora service.

You can check it out here.

67 million are considered “monthly active listeners.”

“We started this company to help people discover and enjoy music they love, and to help artists reach and grow their audiences. Only in our wildest dreams did we imagine what it would become. It is now clear that radio is changing, and that’s great news for music fans and for the tens of thousands of working artists who now have a home on the air,” said Founder TIm Westergren.

In celebration of the milestone, Pandora has released some interesting stats about the service:

• 200+ million songs streamed before 10 am every day, which totals out to about 8,000 songs streaming per second.
• 1.49 billion hours of music streaming in March (170,510 years worth).
• 400+ curated genre stations

Pandora last released some user stats back in January to celebrate the new year. In 2012, users streamed a total of 13 billion hours of music. If March, 2013′s numbers are to be repeated, we can expect Pandora to break this mark this year. They also saw a million+ songs froms over 100,000 artists and 1.6 billion total stations created in 2012.

Just a little over a month ago, Pandora was forced to do something “contrary to their mission” and put a 40-hour per month cap of free mobile listening – citing rising costs.

Here’s an infographic with some more figures from Pandora:

So what sets Pandora on Windows Phone 8 apart from the same app on iOS or Android? For one, Pandora for Windows Phone is integrated into live tiles to provide a quick look at what’s currently playing right from the home screen. Users can also pin individual radio stations to the home screen for easy access to specific stations.

Another Windows Phone exclusive feature is integration with Kid’s Corner. Pandora will automatically filter explicit song content when its switched over to the kid friendly portion of the OS.

To give the Windows Phone app a leg up on the competition, Microsoft will be providing Pandora ad-free throughout the rest of the year. It’s definitely a major advantage over the other versions, but it’s hard to see how a free year of Pandora will convince people to switch to Windows Phone.

Those will already own a Windows Phone, however, are in for a treat. You can grab the new Pandora app here.

Starting this week, free mobile listening will be limited to 40 hours per month. According to Pandora, most users won’t have to worry about this change because the average listener only streams about 20 hours worth of music per month. They say that less than 4% of the company’s total monthly active listeners will even be affected by this.

It appears to be all about costs. Apparently, Pandora’s per-track royalty rates have gone up over 25% in the last 3 years, and are only going to go up over the next few years.

Pandora knows that this isn’t something users want to hear, but the costs must be mitigated.

“Limiting listening is a very unusual thing to do, and very contrary to our mission,” says the company in a blog post.

Pandora promises that they will alert anyone who is fast approaching the 40-hour limit. If you’re about to cross the barrier, you have three options. You can simply stop listening, or you can pay $0.99 for unlimited access for the remainder of the month. There’s also the option to purchase Pandora’s premium subscription, Pandora One, which will keep your listening unlimited and knock out all advertising.

It’s important to note that this limit only affects mobile listeners. You can still stream as many hours per month as you want at home.

Last month, Pandora announced that users had listened to over 13 billion hours of music and created over 1.6 billion stations in 2012.

For one, users listened to over a million different songs by over 100,000 different artists during the year. For two, over 10,000 artists had over 250,000 unique listeners.

“When we created the Music Genome Project thirteen years ago, we had a dual purpose: connect people with music they love and help talented artists find their audiences,” writes founder Tim Westergren. “We knew if we could get the first part right, the second would naturally follow.”

“Well, it looks like that second part is actually beginning to happen,” he adds. “The Pandora audience is large enough now to begin making a real difference in the lives of thousands of working artists.”

Users listened to over 13 billion hours of music in 2012, and created over 1.6 billion stations.

Not bad numbers considering the success of rivals like Spotify. Pandora might be getting even more competition soon, however. Apple is expected to launch a similar offering this year.

U.S. District Judge Saundra Armstrong ruled that Pandora didn’t violate its users privacy when it allowed users to link their accounts with Facebook. The option allowed users to share what music they were currently listening to with friends and family over the social network. The option landed the Internet radio company in hot water as a class action suit was brought against them over an old Michigan law.

The law in question pre-dates the Internet and prevents a company that rents or lends sound recordings from sharing a customer’s rental history. In a way, it’s similar to VPPA. The only difference is that this law is only enforced on the state level, whereas VPPA is a federal law that has been a thorn in Netflix’ side since time immemorial.

So, Netflix gets slapped with a massive fine over not deleting customer records, but Pandora gets away with sharing directly to Facebook. What gives? For one, Armstrong says that a class action lawsuit can’t be filed by someone who has not “suffered actual loss.” In fact, the law firm that brought the suit against Pandora doesn’t even have an office in Michigan. They roped in a Michigan resident to file what now appears to be a frivolous lawsuit.

The court also agreed with Pandora on that the service doesn’t rent music. They are a streaming service, and should be treated differently. It’s a technicality, but a technicality that saved them from a potentially disastrous loss as the Michigan law requires those who break the law to pay out $5,000 per person. CNET estimates that such a payout would cost Pandora over $25 billion.

According to CNET, the legal firm that brought the original suit against Pandora is now weighing their options. The firm said that it will make a decision soon on whether or not to appeal the judge’s ruling. We’ll bring you an update if the firm decides to continue its campaign for misguided privacy protections.

Mashable is reporting that both YouTube and Pandora will be live streaming the festival to music lovers everywhere. For YouTube, this is old (but still cool) news. They’ve been streaming festivals like Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Lollapalooza for years. But this does mark the first time that Pandora will dedicate itself to streaming a weekend music festival.

You should be able to access the live streams from 2pm to 11pm on both days of the concert. Clips from the festival should remain available on YouTube for a month after the festival is over.

Made in America is rapper Jay-Z’s baby, as he has curated all of the talent. Performers included Skrillex, Passion Pit, D’Angelo, Pearl Jam, Drake, Odd Future, Mike Snow, and more. Yesterday, we heard that Ron Howard has signed on to direct the film of the festival. He told the Hollywood Reporter that the film will be “a reflection of the fabric of what it means to be Made in America — what the festival represents, why Jay is doing it and how he relates to each artist” – not just your typical concert documentary.

Of course, for non-premium members, “free” means “ad supported” It’s no different than the desktop or iOS versions – if you don’t want to pay up, you’re going to hear some ad breaks.

One of the cool things about Spotify radio is that users can save tracks that they like. All of their thumbed-up tracks will be saved into a separate “liked from radio” playlist that’s accessible anytime. It’s a simple feature like this that makes Spotify radio such a good music discovery system.

Not only that, but Spotify radio offers unlimited user playlists based on starting tracks, and features a rating mechanism that learns your preferences over time. It’s a strong competitor to streaming radio services like Pandora, and is made even stronger by this release onto Android.

Your free Spotify radio will pull from all of the millions of tracks available, so it’s basically just a personalized, randomized version of the regular Spotify experience.

Unfortunately for international Spotify users, free radio for Android is only available to U.S. users.

You can grab to updated version of the app on Google Play.

Being that large and in charge, Saturn also boasts a ton of moons. 62 moons, in fact (that we know of, at least). And these moons aren’t just slouchy moons, either. For example, Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is bigger than Mercury, the smallest planet in the Solar System. Saturn has a moon that’s bigger than a recognized planet.

Given the scale of size that we’re talking about here, it makes the new photo that NASA shared today of Saturn all the more awe-inspiring.

Captured by the Cassini spacecraft on December 7, 2011, “using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelenghts of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers,” the image shows just how colossal Saturn is when compared to two of its moons, Tethys (right) and Pandora (left). As if Saturn didn’t didn’t already look gargantuan enough, the Cassini spacecraft was approximately 1.3 million miles away from Saturn with the picture was taken. This is the second time in a month that Cassini has put Saturn in the news. Last month, the spacecraft helped scientists discover a “lake” on Saturn’s moon, Titan.

Seriously. Those two moons look like flecks of crumbs tumbling off the chin of a very corpulent Saturn. In other words, that is one monster planet.

[Via NASA's Official Twitter.]
Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.

The company has maintained their focus on congress as they will be meeting with the Copyright Royalty Board in the near future, to determine royalty policy for the period between 2016 and 2020. Pandora co-founder, Tim Westergren will testify before congress to plead his case today.

Tim Westergren, Pandora’s co-founder, comments on broadcast royalties in his written testimony prepared for a congressional hearing today:

“Now I am fully supportive of fair compensation for artists,”

“But this lack of a level playing field is fundamentally unfair and indefensible.”

“It is time for Congress to level the playing field and to approach radio royalties in a technology neutral manner,”

Just for reference, Pandora paid 50% of its revenues last year to recording artists, Sirius/XM paid a total of 7.5%, and traditional AM/FM broadcast paid nothing! I would say that’s a huge discrepancy. No wonder the recording industry is hurting, nobody’s paying them any royalties. This issue needs to be addressed.

We will keep you updated on what the United States Congress and the Copyright Royalty Board decides about future royalty payments from broadcast radio. Hopefully they will agree on a fee more reflective of the times we live in and more just to recording artists and broadcasters alike.