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

Too little too late

[TFlan91]

I am an avid (paid) user of Pandora, and I love the service, have been using it for ~15 years.

But this is too little, too late... I am the only one among my friends that use Pandora. Everyone else uses Youtube, Spotify, and even iHeartRadio... I don't see this gaining any user base for them, only keeping the user base that they currently have

Re:Too little too late

[ProzacPatient]

I use Spotify and since Spotify has stations now in like manner to Pandora I don't really feel the need nor want to spend money on a subscription to Pandora. Originally the big thing for me about Spotify over Pandora is that Spotify will let me listen to practically whatever I want on demand at any time.