Pandora Premium Finally Becomes Official, Costing $10/month

A little over a year after acquiring key assets from Rdio, Pandora is now getting ready to make one of the biggest changes to its service in its history. The service will cost $9.99 per month, which falls right in step with its rivals. Pandora offers a free ad-supported service, while it also offers a monthly $5 subscription that was recently relaunched as Pandora Plus, which ditches the ads, offers downloads and better quality streams, and an unlimited number of skips and replays.

How much do they cost?

When you create a new playlist using the Premium service, you can ask Pandora to fill in any gaps using the same technology behind its radio service.

As with other subscription music services, Pandora Premium will also have an offline mode.

That six-month free trial for current Plus users is “compelling”, said John Egbert, an equity analyst at Stifel, in a note to investors Monday.

According to an article in the Verge “it’s clear that Pandora has made Premium as novice-friendly as possible”.

Pandora (NYSE:P) announced today that Pandora Premium, its first ever on-demand streaming tier, launches this week.

Search feature on Pandora Premium is dubbed as pretty exceptional as well. He maintains a Buy on Pandora shares with a target of $15. My Thumbs Up appears very similar to Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Daily Mixes. On Pandora, once you’ve added some songs to a playlist, you’ll get the option to “Add Similar Songs”. You can request an invitation to the service here.

New music for you… and only you:Browse is stocked with personalized suggestions for the latest releases from current and soon-to-be favorites whether you listen to classical, metal, jazz, hip hop, country, and everything in between. The company also intend to make Pandora Premium available on more devices.

How are they the same?

The service lets users listen to any song they want rather than only receiving curated playlists based on artists and genres. One area where Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play Music have an advantage, though, is with their family plan offerings as you can have 6 users, all with separate libraries, for just $14.99 per month. Most of the other perks have to do with Pandora catering to your likes. Videos aren’t there either, so you’re gonna still be YouTubing your favorite music videos.

The thumbs up and down icons are still there and every time you thumbs-up a song, it gets added to an automatically-generated playlist. That feature will improve over time as you add and remove songs.