Pandora News and Updates: New $5 Pandora Plus Offers New Features and More Songs
The ever popular online radio service provider, Pandora, announced a new $5 service called "Pandora Plus". This service offers new features, more songs, and a whole lot more.
New Music Acquisitions
The existing paid offering, Pandora One, would be replaced by the new Pandora Plus service. Pandora One had previously focused on removing ads, while Pandora Plus would be offering a lot more features for the same value.
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This follows Pandora's acquisition of music licenses from Sony Music, Universal Music and the Merlin Network. Pandora has also made different deals with more than thirty independent labels and distributors, including The Orchard, which is owned by Sony. These acquisitions will allow Pandora to better compete with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music.
The ever-growing library of the radio provider allows Pandora Plus to have a catalog of around 2 million songs. A new on-demand service that will go for $10 a month will clash head-on with Spotify and will arrive later this year.
Pandora Plus Features
Pandora Vice President of Product Chris Becherer was impressed by the quantity of songs, but has noted that it is still the quality of the library that matters. The service focuses on the best music curation around the tracks.
Pandora Plus will offer unlimited song skips and replays of songs. It will be the first to implement this feature among internet radio service providers. This allows users to actually hear what they want to listen to, in an unlimited number of times.
The new $5 subscription will also unlock an offline listening option. When you and your device go offline, an informational message will play. The new predictive offline mode will then allow Pandora to save some of the tracks from your four most popular stations, including the personalized Thumbprint radio, for offline listening. When internet connection drops, Pandora will switch to this playlist automatically.
Free Music and Pandora Shares
Pandora also has something in store for their non-paying consumers. Those who listen to their music for free will now be able to skip and replay more songs in the service. This will then prompt them to opt into a video advertisement. This free option will allow users to experience some of the benefits of the Pandora Plus without spending money.
While Pandora has about 78 million users, only around 4 million users were subscribed to Pandora One. The emergence of services like Spotify and Apple Music has greatly impacted its market. This is why they revamped their paid subscription, to mainly appeal once again to their listeners.
