Steve PMHWith over 80 million active subscribers, Pandora Music is one of the largest audio entertainment streaming services in the U.S.
It has dominated the streaming platform ever since its inception in 2000, and was once bigger than Spotify and Apple Music combined.
But what is Pandora Music, anyway?
How does it compare to other music streaming services, and is it worth getting a premium subscription for?
What Is Pandora Music?
Pandora Music is a US-based audio streaming service with over 80 million active users. With Pandora, you can listen to music with or without an account or premium subscription.
Brief History of Pandora Music
Pandora Music was founded in the year 2000 by the owners of Savage Beast Technologies: Will Glaser, Tim Westergren, and Jon Kraft.
Here’s a brief timeline of Pandora’s rise to success:
2000–2003: Rough Beginnings
In its early years, Pandora was a completely different service. Instead of the streaming service we know and love today, it was a business-to-business licensing company under the name Music Genome Project.
It did well for a while, but it didn’t quite manage to reach its maximum potential. In just under a year, the company ran through its initial $2 million funding and almost went bankrupt.
From such a big loss, the founders of the Music Genome Project were backed into a corner.
With no funding to be had, the company had no choice but to let go of almost all its staff—except for the 50-some people who were willing to work for free.
But after two years without pay, the remaining employees have had enough.
Although they agreed to work for free, they hoped the company would somehow turn itself around and grow big, but no such thing happened. As a result, Savage Beast Technologies was sued by its employees.
2004: Slow and Steady Success
Despite blow after blow of failure, the company persisted.
Motivated by the success of the Best Buy pilot, the company went to Walden Venture Capital and borrowed funding of $8 million in 2004.
With the funding on hand, the company re-establish itself in a new light. Instead of focusing on businesses, Savage Beast Technologies shifted its attention to the consumer market.
The Music Genome Project was renamed Pandora Media and was revamped as an internet radio service.
2005: New Improvements
Upon its official launch in 2005, Pandora was advertised as a subscription-based service with a 10-hour free trial.
It was an instant hit; thousands upon thousands of users subscribed to the service shortly after its release.
But although this is the case, not a lot of people continued on after the free trial. Later, the company realized that people were abusing the 10-hour free trial by subscribing to the service with new email addresses.
To remedy this issue, Pandora added a free, ad-supported version to at least make a bit of money from its free users.
This turns out to be a good idea. Without the pay-per-play option, Pandora became one of the best consumer-friendly applications in its era.
2006–2013: Huge Comeback
The new-and-improved Pandora was a smashing success. In 2006, the company amassed more than eight million listeners and a library of over 500,000 songs.
Eight million turned to 12, and 12 turned to 20. By 2011, Pandora reached a jaw-dropping 80 million users.
When 2013 came around, Pandora became the biggest radio streaming service in the United States. With over 200 million users and 70 million active listeners a month, Pandora accounted for 70% of radio listening in the country.
To further sweeten the deal for its free subscribers, Pandora removed the 40-hour-per-month limitation and doubled its library size to 1.5 million songs.
The company also added a special premium subscription for ad-free listening and unlimited playback.
The premium subscription wasn’t as popular as the free subscription, but Pandora was still making a decent amount of revenue through repeated ads.
2014–Present Time: Here to Stay
Today, Pandora is among the biggest audio-streaming services in the US.
Since its inception, over 10 billion stations have been created by both moderators and users.
Unfortunately, the company took a major blow with the rapidly-increasing popularity of Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music.
The company has 80 million active users, but only around 4 million are paying a premium.
In comparison, Spotify, which was launched in 2006, boasts 400 million active users and over 180 million premium users.
Still, Pandora is often the top choice for radio users in the country.
Pandora has a ton of loyal users and it earns a decent amount of revenue, so the company is likely here to stay for an indefinite amount of time.
Is Pandora Available Outside the US?
Unfortunately, no. Pandora isn’t available outside the US.
Pandora used to be available in Australia and New Zealand, but the company discontinued its services in the latter two countries back in 2017.
Since the majority of Pandora’s subscribers come from the US, the company focused its attention on the US market.
Music copyright and license vary in countries across the world, and Pandora can’t afford to negotiate licenses with companies outside the US.
If the company enters the global market, Pandora may have to spend 70% of its revenue on streaming costs alone, which may result in bankruptcy.
With that said, people often “trick the system” and access Pandora’s services through VPN solutions. So, if you live in Europe, you can still use Pandora as long as your IP address is linked to the US.
Pandora’s ‘Freemium’ Service: Features and Limitations
You don’t necessarily need to subscribe to Pandora Plus or Pandora Premium to use the Pandora app. Like Spotify and YouTube Music, Pandora’s free service is supported by audio and pop-up ads.
The audio ads appear after three to four songs, so if you’re unbothered by the occasional 30-second ad, you can listen to as many songs as you want without limitations.
Pandora used to have a 40-hour listening limit on the free app, but that feature has long since been removed in September 2011.
Pandora’s free plan includes a limited number of song skips, which you can “earn” by watching a 15 to 30-second ad, and ad-supported on-demand playback.
If you interact with the ad (i.e., open the ad’s website or purchase an item from the ad), you’ll “unlock” what Pandora calls a Premium Session.
The Premium Session gives you an ad-free experience and complimentary access to most of Pandora Premium’s features in a single listening session.
Pandora’s free service likewise allows you to create personalized stations based on your favorite genres, songs, and artists.
You won’t be able to manually customize the playlist you’ve created, though. Pandora’s algorithm decides what goes into your queue based on the options you’ve created.
If you don’t like a specific song or artist, you can let the algorithm know by pressing the thumbs down button.
Unlike the paid versions, Free Pandora doesn’t allow track replays. The ads are quite prominent as well, with banner ads that sometimes completely replace the album art on the app’s Now Playing screen.
Free Pandora’s songs don’t sound as high-quality as the paid subscription, but the difference isn’t really all that noticeable.
On the mobile app, you can switch between Standard (64 kbps AAC+) and High (128 kbps mp3). On the desktop app, you get the Standard quality only.
Pandora Plus vs. Pandora Premium: Similarities and Differences
You can opt for Pandora Premium or Pandora Plus for a better music-listening experience. Here are the differences between the two.
Pandora Plus
Pandora Plus offers ad-free listening and access to thousands of libraries, music, and podcasts.
With this service, you have the ability to replay and skip tracks as much as you want. You also have the ability to listen to a certain amount of music offline. Extended timeout periods are increased, as well.
Pandora Plus costs $4.99 a month or $54.89 a year, according to the official Pandora website.
Pandora Premium
Pandora Premium is the upgraded version of Pandora Plus.
Like Pandora Plus, it has unlimited skips, replays, and zero ads.
However, Premium subscribers have the added advantage of unlimited offline listening, creating and sharing customizable playlists, and the ability to search and play songs on-demand.
Timeouts are much longer with Premium, too.
Pandora Premium offers a higher-quality listening experience compared to Pandora Plus. With the Premium, you’re given three audio quality options:
- Low Quality: 32 kbps AAC+
- Standard Quality: 64 kbps AAC+
- High Quality: 192 kbps mp3
Depending on the package you choose, Pandora Premium costs anywhere between $4.99 a month to $14.99 a month.
The standard Pandora Premium costs $9.99 a month or $109.89 a year.
If you’re enrolled at an accredited higher education institution, you can opt for the Student Premium service for only $4.99 a month or $59.88 a year.
Pandora Premium Family costs $14.99 a month or $164.89 a year, but you get six unique Pandora accounts instead of just one.
Pandora also has a Military Premium, targeted toward plus retirees, national guards, reserves, veterans, and dependents. It costs $7.99 a month or $87.79 a year.
Is Pandora Premium Better Than Spotify Premium?
Spotify is perhaps the largest music streaming service in the world.
Unlike Pandora, which operates only in the US, Spotify is available in most major countries, including Canada, Australia, Japan, and over 50 other countries.
Currently, it has over 400 million monthly active users, of which 180 million are paying subscribers.
Like Pandora, Spotify is free to use with ads. The biggest difference between the two is that Pandora allows ad skips after 15 seconds while Spotify doesn’t.
In terms of premium services, Pandora Premium and Spotify Premium are much the same. They both unlock features such as:
- Unlimited and unrestricted access to music, podcasts, and libraries
- High-quality audio streaming
- Ad-free, on-demand playback
- Offline listening
- Song downloads
Pandora Premium and Spotify Premium costs the same, too; $9.99 per month for the individual plan, $14.99 per month for the family plan, and $4.99 for the student plan. Spotify also has a Premium Duo at $12.99 a month.
With that said, there are some notable differences between the services each offers.
For one, Spotify offers better audio quality and up to five audio quality selections, with its highest going up to 320 kbps.
Pandora has three audio quality settings, with its highest capped at 192 kbps.
Also, Spotify has a much bigger library of songs thanks to its global licensing deals with Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music, UMG, and international companies. It offers a decent selection of indie music, too.
In total, Spotify has around 82 million tracks while Pandora has just over 40 million tracks.
The difference is expected, though, especially since Pandora only operates inside the US and mostly curates English songs.
But even though Pandora isn’t as big as Spotify in terms of tracks, Pandora’s collections are much more fleshed out and organized.
Pandora’s Browse section is grouped into 29 different categories, with each category boasting multiple stations. If you open Pandora’s Hip-Hop section, for example, you’re met with over 80 individual stations.
On top of the regular music genres, Pandora also has 25 different genres in its podcast section, which includes True Crime, News, Comedy, and Fiction.
So far, Pandora has over 600,000 episodes in its arsenal.
All and all, both offer a huge selection of songs, podcasts, and libraries, spanning hundreds of different genres.
I find Pandora’s platform a bit more organized than Spotify’s, but at the end of the day, only you can decide which audio streaming service is worth your money.
Is Pandora’s Paid Plans Worth It?
If you spend the majority of your time listening to music, subscribing to one of Pandora’s paid subscriptions is absolutely worth it.
Even with competitors such as Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music, I prefer Pandora’s interface and music segregation the most.
Plus, Pandora’s active algorithm—the Music Genome Project—is highly intuitive and quickly adapts to your interests. In fact, I believe it’s better than Spotify’s discovery algorithm.
For those who don’t listen to much music, Pandora’s Premium plan may not be worth the price.
If you fall under this category and don’t mind listening to ads every two to three songs, go with the freemium plan.
If the ads bother you, go with Pandora’s Plus plan; it’s not as good as the Premium, but it offers ad-free listening and unlimited playback, which most can argue is more than enough for daily listening.
