MacRumors

Pandora will begin limiting mobile listeners to 40 hours of free listening per month, the company revealed in a blog post today. The change was made in response to a rise in the royalty rates that the company must pay to record companies.

Users who wish to listen to more than 40 hours per month can subscribe to the Pandora One service and get unlimited listening, as well as no advertising -- or pay a one-time $0.99 fee to listen as long as they like for the rest of the month. Desktop users can continue to listen to unlimited music.

Most of you reading this will never hit the limit. In fact, it will affect less than 4% of our total monthly active listeners. For perspective, the average listener spends approximately 20 hours listening to Pandora across all devices in any given month.

That said, limiting listening is a very unusual thing to do, and very contrary to our mission so we wanted to share a quick explanation. Pandora's per-track royalty rates have increased more than 25% over the last 3 years, including 9% in 2013 alone and are scheduled to increase an additional 16% over the next two years. 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.

Pandora may come under increasing pressure from competitors over the next year -- Google and Apple are both rumored to be working on subscription-based music services, and Spotify is reportedly working to bring its free product to mobile devices.

Six months after it started carrying the iPhone, U.S. regional prepaid carrier Cricket reports that it will only purchase half of its first-year commitment of iPhones by June 2013, reports BGR.

Back in June 2012, Cricket started carrying the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S after committing to buy at least $900 million worth of iPhones from Apple over the life of its deal with Apple. It got the iPhone 5 a week after it launched on the major U.S. carriers.

The carrier revealed that it is on pace to purchase only half of its first-year commitment from Apple through June 2013. The information in the filing contradicts earlier statements made by the company’s chief financial officers Jerry Elliot. The executive previously said that “sales of Apple devices were pretty good in the fourth quarter” and the carrier wasn’t concerned about meeting its commitment with Apple.

Cricket is generally considered one of roughly half a dozen "super-regional" carriers in the United States, with more than 5 million customers. The carrier offers a nationwide network through roaming agreements and its prepaid model offers simple pricing with no activation fees or overage charges.

Apple's annual shareholder's meeting took place at the company's Cupertino campus this morning. The meeting is held to allow shareholders to address corporate officers and to handle certain corporate business like reelecting the board of directors and voting on certain proposals.

According to CNBC's Jon Fortt, preliminary results show all directors reelected, Apple's accounting firm was approved, a non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation passed, a proposal to require executives to hold 33% of their stock awards until retirement was defeated, as was a proposal to create a Human Rights board committee. The full text of the proposals are available in Apple's proxy statement. Tim Cook received 99.1% investor approval.

The run up to this year's meeting was more contentious than most. A judge blocked the vote on one of Apple's proposed changes following a lawsuit by a major Apple shareholder. He ruled that three separate proposals had been bundled together, when they should be voted on individually.

During the Q&A portion, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he knows shareholders are "disappointed" by its share price, and that focus should be on the long term, with revenue and profits following. Additionally, Cook said that Apple is working on "new categories" but wouldn't comment on anything specifically.

Cook confirmed that the plans for Apple's new "spaceship" campus are slightly delayed, with a move-in date around 2016, as was previously reported. He reiterated that Apple is "seriously considering" the issue of returning more cash to shareholders.

Last year's meeting did not result in any significant changes for the company. Apple's stock price jumped yesterday on a rumor that Apple would announce a stock split today, but that did not come to fruition.

Apple has added movie support to its iTunes in the Cloud service in 11 new European countries today, enabling customers in those countries to re-download content previously purchased from the iTunes store. The new countries include Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.

As noted by French site iGen [Google translation], France has also seen iTunes in the Cloud support go live for TV shows.

iTunes in the Cloud was first launched for music in June 2011 in the United States, with Apple adding movie and TV show support for U.S. users in March 2012. Movie coverage has been gradually expanded since that time, with today's additions bringing the total to nearly 100 countries.

iTunes in the Cloud support for TV shows remains much more limited, with France becoming just the fifth country to see the feature, joining Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

GigaOM reports that Major League Baseball is expanding support for Apple's Passbook app, announcing that the digital tickets will be accepted at 13 stadiums this season, up from just four last season.

MLB was one of Apple's launch partners for Passbook in September, with mobile tickets accepted by the New York Mets, San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals. They are being joined this season by the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland A’s, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs. Three further teams are due to join, but have not yet been named.

Tickets can be purchased using the free AtBat app and then stored in Passbook.

Not to be outdone, Samsung today announced Samsung Wallet, an Android app which mirrors Passbook's functionality, right down to time- and location-based push notifications. The app is currently a developer-only beta, with the public version launching soon. The Verge reports that Samsung has also signed a deal with MLB, as well as Walgreens, Belly, Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com and Lufthansa for the app's launch.

The company showed off a few features of the new app during its developer keynote, and it's quite clear that Samsung took its design inspiration for Wallet from Apple's Passbook (even down to the icon that Samsung used).

Interestingly, the app will not support near field communications (NFC) payment technology for the time being, despite Samsung's existing partnership with Visa's PayWave service. Samsung says that retailers have so far been reluctant to invest in the additional infrastructure to support NFC payments, making NFC support for Wallet a lower-priority feature.

The U.S. Department of Defense today announced (via Bloomberg) a "commercial mobile device implementation plan" that would allow iOS and Android devices to be used on its secure classified and protected unclassified communication networks beginning in February 2014.

The implementation plan establishes a framework to equip the department’s 600,000 mobile-device users with secure classified and protected unclassified mobile solutions that leverage commercial off-the-shelf products, promote the development and use of mobile applications to improve functionality, decrease costs, and enable increased personal productivity.  The plan orchestrates a series of operational pilots from across the DoD components that will incorporate lessons learned, ensure interoperability, refine technical requirements, influence commercial standards, and create operational efficiencies for DoD mobile users.

As Bloomberg notes, BlackBerry is currently the dominant device at the Pentagon with almost 450,000 devices being used by its employees. Over the past several years, BlackBerry has seen its enterprise dominance chipped away by Apple devices, as corporations and other government agencies have been trading in their BlackBerry devices for iOS and Android ones.

This would mark the first time that commercial products like iPhones and iPads would be allowed on the department's classified networks. The department also plans to create a military mobile applications store and hire a contractor that would build a network system capable of handling as many as 8 million devices.

Teri Takai, the DoD's chief information officer, said that the move is about "keeping the department's workforce relevant" in a time where information accessibility and cybersecurity are crucial to "mission success." The department currently uses older BlackBerry devices, but the company is set to launch its new BlackBerry Z10 phone, based on the company's revamped operating system, next month.

The Wall Street Journal reports on recent moves Apple has made to increase sales in India, one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Recently the company has launched the iTunes Store and the Apple TV there, and it was rumored that Apple Retail Stores were coming to the subcontinent as well.

Apple is sidestepping wireless carriers to seize greater control over marketing in India and offering no-interest loans to lure lower-income consumers. The company has also boosted staff in India by 30% to 170 employees in the past six months. And it is ramping up the introduction of other products, with the Apple TV video-streaming gadget expected to reach stores in coming weeks, people familiar with the matter say.

The result is that Apple shipped more than 252,000 iPhones to India in the quarter through December, more than triple the number in the previous three months, according to research firm Canalys.

India has frequently been mentioned when talking about Apple's possible development of a lower-cost iPhone, because most smartphone users in India use postpaid plans and pay for their phones up front, instead of the subsidization model that is used in the West.

The Journal quotes a number of experts saying that Apple will have to come out with a more inexpensive phone to compete with other manufacturers -- Samsung sells Android phones that start at $100, while the cheapest iPhones sell for $500 and a new iPhone 5 is close to $850.

Bloomberg reports that Apple is among 60 companies that have signed on to a filing that will be presented to the Supreme Court backing gay marriage in the United States. The court is currently weighing the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, in which voters barred gay marriage in 2008. Apple had publicly opposed Proposition 8 at the time.

“No matter how welcoming the corporate culture, it cannot overcome the societal stigma institutionalized by Proposition 8 and similar laws,” the companies will argue, according to a copy of the brief provided by Orrick Herrington Sutcliffe LLP, the law firm representing the group.

The filing is part of an effort to convince the court that gay marriage has wide public support. Dozens of Republicans, including former presidential candidate and Utah Governor Jon Huntsman and former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, are also planning to file a brief backing such unions.

Only nine states explicitly permit same-sex marriage, and the companies signing the filing argue that workplace morale and recruiting are harmed in the other 41 states. Among the companies joining Apple on the filing are Intel, Facebook, Nike, Oracle, and Qualcomm. The Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments on the Proposition 8 case and a second one addressing the federal Defense of Marriage Act in late March.

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Hedge fund manager Doug Kass tweeted (via 9to5Mac) a short time ago that he is hearing rumors of an announcement regarding a stock split coming at Apple's shareholder meeting scheduled for tomorrow at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California. The stock has reversed course since Kass's Tweet, moving from down $5 to up $5.

Many observers, such as Fortune's Philip Elmer-Dewitt, are calling into question Kass's statements, noting the sequence of events that saw him announce a large position in Apple, float the rumor of a stock split, and then announce that he was selling off shares after the stock spiked. Kass has, however, defended his Tweet, saying that the rumors were "all over the Street".

While a stock split would not add any intrinsic value to Apple's market value, some have viewed a potential split as a positive for Apple under the perception that a company is more likely to split when it is confident that the stock price will rise in the future. Observers have also argued that high stock prices for companies like Apple and Google have kept them from being added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average given the outsized impact they would have on the price-weighted index.

Apple's last stock split came in February 2005, a 2-for-1 move that brought the price of a single share down to just under $45. Apple has refrained from splitting its stock since that time, with investors seeing the share price rise to over $700 before pulling back to the current level around $450.