Pandora Has Announced Its $5 Subscription Service (recode.net)

Peter Kafka, writing for Recode: Earlier this week, Pandora signed two of the three big music labels to deals that will let it launch new streaming music services. Now it is launching one of them: Pandora Plus, an "ad-free radio experience with dramatically increased functionality," which will sell for $5 a month. Most Pandora users won't be able to listen to the service today: A Pandora rep says the service is going live to about 1 percent of its user base today and won't fully roll out to all of its users for another month or so. In the meantime, Pandora is still negotiating with Warner Music Group, the remaining big music label that hasn't signed a deal with the streaming service. Sources say the two sides have an agreement in principle, but were still papering the deal late last night -- apparently Pandora didn't want to wait before it announced the new service. Pandora also wants to launch a $10-a-month service, but that one may not launch for months. The new $5 service replaces Pandora's existing $5 ad-free service and has two new features: The ability to skip as many songs as you want and the option to download a limited number of songs for offline listening.

Comments

Re:Too little too late

[JoeMerchant]

I've had a continuous Pandora One subscription since 2008... I used it free off and on since about 2005. I think I bought my last CD from Amazon (or anywhere) in about 2007. We sold our (combined) CD collection to a used-dealer around 2010. Don't miss 'em, do wish Pandora had better offline support - paying $0.01/MB to get music while on the road is a little crazy when you can load every song you've ever heard at full quality onto a $10 chip that's smaller than a fingernail.