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.

Re:Too little too late

[hackel]

Holy shit, I was about to call bullshit on your 15-year claim, but it really has been around for 16 years now! I don't think I heard of it until 5 years ago or so, and I'd like to think I'm generally fairly up on the whole tech world. Clearly not in this case, I am totally amazed.

For me, Google Music is where it's at. Being able to upload my own stuff is pretty huge. Plus being free (for my own stuff) is rather nice.

Re:Too little too late

[JoeMerchant]

It's all about the ads. Can we get decent music, in the style we are in the mood for, without ads? I was good with that at $3/month, I'm starting to squirm at $5/month - $10/month is clearly over the line for me.

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.

Re:Too little too late

[b0bby]

Yeah, I have been paying for years and this is good news, but I have also signed up for the family Spotify plan and if I decide to drop one, I think it will be Pandora. Playing the same songs too often is my only real gripe, especially if this means you'll be able to skip more often.

Re:Too little too late

[Wing_Zero]

pandora has always had a 30 day trial for plus, and i renew my subscription every year in one payment.

Re:Too little too late

[clong83]

I've been listening to Pandora for years for free, no subscription. I'd say I regularly listen to it anywhere between 4-10 hours a week, and I sometimes go months without hearing an ad.

So, serious question: What do other people hear? Are there lots of ads? Is this a regional thing? Or maybe a city/rural area thing, where cities get ads and rural areas get ad-free Pandora for free? Or is it just that some people find even one targeted ad a month an unacceptable intrusion?

Re:Too little too late

[Pascoea]

The quantity of ads depends heavily on the radio station/type of music you are listening to. I have 3 main stations, stand up comedy, non-modern pop, and one closer to new pop music. In my experience, the closer you get to "mainstream" (new, popular) music the more ads you will hear. It also seems that the more you skip the more ads you hear. On my pop station i'll hear an ad almost every time I skip, on the comedy station it's closer to every 3rd time.

Re:Too little too late

[blackomegax]

Thats because pandora paid Honda for prime spot there. I'd infinitely rather have Spotify in my civic than Pandora.

Re:Too little too late

[nmb3000]

So, serious question: What do other people hear? Are there lots of ads? Is this a regional thing?

Ad-blockers like Adblock Plus usually block all visual and auditory ads on Pandora's free version. I used to listen to it all the time and see or hear an ad, but after a couple of months I decided to subscribe because I want to support companies which offer a service that isn't subsidized by advertising. I've paid for Pandora for about 3 years now.

My question is what this means for existing customers. I pay $4 per month now, since I was an existing subscriber when they moved to $5. Will we be included in this move to the new system at our current price, or will it increase?

Re:Too little too late

[nmb3000]

I used to listen to it all the time and WOULD NEVER see or hear an ad

Gah, fixed. I would love to have a 3-minute window where comment editing was allowed.

Re:Too little too late

[Carnildo]

I don't know where you're getting $10 from -- the music Pandora's streamed to me over the years would barely fit on a 128GB SD card, and I can't find those for less than $30.

Re:Too little too late

[JoeMerchant]

32GB for $10 is what I was thinking. My music CD collection fits in roughly 32GB of space, and it takes me several months to play through it even once while driving to/from work. Pandora seems to repeat songs at least weekly, much more often if you don't hammer on them to get variety into the stations.

I'm not counting repeated songs as needing to be stored multiple times. Also, I suppose I'm not counting the seven live versions of some songs that Pandora seems to like to play if you ever thumbs-up a live cut of anything.

Didn't they already have a service?

[ausekilis]

So they've replaced Pandora One, a $5 service that eliminates adds and lets you skip songs, with Pandora Plus, a $5 service that eliminates adds and lets you skip songs?

Re:Didn't they already have a service?

[TFlan91]

Skip unlimited songs and download limited songs

Re:Didn't they already have a service?

[Diss Champ]

Does Pandora One come with the ability to download your songs for offline listening? That looks like the interesting piece to me, depending on what the limit is.

Re:But pirating is free

[Oswald McWeany]

I mostly listen to music for free too. I download 6 songs completely free from the Library each month using Freegal. I listen to Pandora (free). I sell my (inaccurately if they ask too personal questions) soul to Google to get the google rewards money for downloading music from google play.

All free. All legal.

On the flipside though Pastafarians will tell you that pirating will help reverse global warming, and that's a good thing.

Other People's Playlists

[jetkust]

I'm surprised so many people want to listen to playlists that somebody else made.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[hackel]

Why? I want to listen to "playlists" than an algorithm made, absolutely. Pandora's algorithms suck, unfortunately, but in theory they could be awesome. I've never understood the concept of manual playlist creation, nor why every music player has that ability. I can't imagine spending so much time sitting around picking out random tracks to put on a playlist. I just want to press a button and have music I like playing. That's it.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[JoeMerchant]

I'm surprised at how much time I used to spend making "mixtapes," or even just straight tapes of albums. Couldn't play vinyl in the car, and over half my listening time was in the car.

With Pandora, if you take the time to rate the songs they choose for you, you can get a pretty decent "station" for listening after about 20-30 ratings. Or, you can just name one song and listen to whatever garb they think matches that, and it's still always better than listening to radio with ads.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[Lord Apathy]

I love to listen to other peoples play lists. Lets me find other bands and even other kinds of music. My musical tastes are pretty wide. I will list to anything but hard core gansta rap and old school country.

To many bad memories about old school country. Spent way to much money on therapy for that one.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[avandesande]

This is just the thing if you like to discover new(to you) music.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[Pascoea]

Curious what kind of music you listen to. I have a couple stations on Pandora that are "trained" pretty well, to the point where I'm only skipping a track here or there. But it seems like some genres are better than others, it seems to suck with anything that was created in the current decade. "Oh, you just added the new Disturbed song? I bet you'd like some Justin Beiber to go with that!" Or "you've thumbed down every live track I've played, maybe you'll like this live track instead"

Re:Other People's Playlists

[imidan]

I have never succeeded at training a Pandora station. Mine all inevitably turn into all Beatles all the time. The first time I did one, it turned into a Beatles station within a day. I'm not a big Beatles fan, but I don't mind an occasional track, so I hadn't been downvoting them. For my next try, I mercilessly downvoted Beatles songs whenever they came on. That station turned into solo projects from member of the Beatles, covers of Beatles songs by other artists, Beatles covering the music of other artists, and live performances from the Beatles. I tried variations on these methods on several stations. The last straw was when I had downvoted too many Beatles-related songs in an hour and Pandora punished me with a ukulele medley of What a Wonderful World and Over the Rainbow. That was the end of my time with Pandora.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[Oswald McWeany]

Yahoo had an interesting approach with LaunchCast about 15 years ago.

Their algorithm was a little different- it worked by looking at how you voted and looked to see what songs people who voted similar to you liked. (rather than the complicated "heavily syncopated in a minor key with latin roots" stuff that Amazon works on).

I really liked LaunchCast- shame they ditched it. (actually they changed it to something completely different before ditching it).

Re:Other People's Playlists

[Oswald McWeany]

Pandora has opened me up to artists I've never even heard of before.

Apparently I like Hot-club Jazz too. It's opened up whole genres of music to me that I probably never would have explored but learnt that I did enjoy.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[blackomegax]

Yeah i wish they had a global ban option for certain tags.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[whoever57]

I have never succeeded at training a Pandora station. Mine all inevitably turn into all Beatles all the time.

I think that you simply don't know what you like and Pandora knows better! Perhaps you should admit that you really like the Beatles!

But seriously, I haven't had any problems training Pandora stations. One of my stations did start including some Beatles songs, but it hasn't played any Beatles for a long time now.

Also, seriously, have you considered the possibility that you like music that is similar to the Beatles, but just don't like the Beatles "because".

Re:Other People's Playlists

[nmb3000]

I'm surprised so many people want to listen to playlists that somebody else made.

It's the new radio. Even when I used to make mixtapes and mix CDs in school, I'd eventually get tired of listening to the same things and turn to the radio to get some variety.

I love the idea of a radio station -- a curated playlist that fits within a general theme and evolves over time. That's what I'm very often looking for in music, and it's why I still listen to the radio in my car. I get tired of single albums or trying to manually create large and diverse playlists. It's also why I use still Pandora. I have a few stations which seem to work fairly well, although it does seem to get pretty repetitive, and I'm wary of adding new seed artists due to fears of ruining what I've got currently.

That said, I abhor advertising and don't tolerate it in any quantity. I can subscribe to Pandora but when a radio station starts playing ads I change stations. If all of my usual stations are on commercials, I mute the volume and enjoy the silence for a while. At least mixtapes never had that problem (well, unless you forgot to hit the Stop button while recording! :)

Re:Other People's Playlists

[rsborg]

I'm surprised so many people want to listen to playlists that somebody else made.

Why not? I can't listen to the same stuff all the time - content discovery is, like, 90% of the joy of say, shopping or dating. We're hardwired to like discovering new things (some of us more than others).

Re:Other People's Playlists

[Nunya666]

I have never succeeded at training a Pandora station. Mine all inevitably turn into all Beatles all the time. The first time I did one, it turned into a Beatles station within a day. I'm not a big Beatles fan, but I don't mind an occasional track, so I hadn't been downvoting them. For my next try, I mercilessly downvoted Beatles songs whenever they came on. That station turned into solo projects from member of the Beatles, covers of Beatles songs by other artists, Beatles covering the music of other artists, and live performances from the Beatles. I tried variations on these methods on several stations. The last straw was when I had downvoted too many Beatles-related songs in an hour and Pandora punished me with a ukulele medley of What a Wonderful World and Over the Rainbow. That was the end of my time with Pandora.

You might want give Pandora another shot, but might I suggest that you not select a Beatles station next time?

Re:Other People's Playlists

[fluffernutter]

The nice thing about Pandora is that is doesn't stick to 'artist X is in genre Y'. It will take the quality of the music you like and pick that quality from any genre.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[sysrammer]

Yeah, I had my stations trained pretty well on LaunchCast. I liked how I could choose by how much I liked something. I might have a song rated high for a while, then maybe back down a bit if it started getting too much airplay.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[sysrammer]

Yeah, back when I had lot's of time and little money, and, yes, wanted it in the car. Had some outrageous road tapes.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[sysrammer]

One of the things I like is searching for a song and finding various bands doing covers of it. This was a great feature for me even back in the Napster days.

Re:Other People's Playlists

[sysrammer]

That's what attracted me to the service. For non-modern pop, I think it works pretty well. For the modern commercial stuff, not so much.

Terrible Selection

[hackel]

Pandora is full of these terrible "compilation" albums instead of the original releases. It's impossible to use it as a serious classical music listener. They don't provide adequate information about composers, performers, orchestras, etc. They treat something on the "Baby Mozart" CD the same as a serious recording. It's ridiculous. A very similar situation for original soundtracks, which I also enjoy. Very unhappy with Pandora overall. It's probably great for people who just want their top-40 hits of whichever decade within the last few decades, but for the rest of us, it's awful.

Re:Terrible Selection

[JoeMerchant]

If you bitch to them loudly enough, they just might start taking classical seriously. Especially if you've signed up for their $10/month service and you're threatening to leave.

They score music on "dimensions" and what they need to do to fix the classical selection is add dimensions that classical listeners care about, then as you rate their selections up or down, they'll steer future selections toward things you've liked and away from things you've disliked (and they'll always still slip in "heavy rotation promoted" songs that even vaguely resemble your ratings - this is how they keep your prices down, by extracting money from other sources.)

Right now, I'd bet their engine is "blind" to the dimensions you care about, so all the ratings in the world won't matter, they'll still be playing you Baby Mozart because it's by the same composer you liked in another song.

Re:Terrible Selection

[Quince alPillan]

Something that I've learned about Pandora is that you can't have multiple genres in the same station (use a mix for that) and you can't thumb up certain songs or you'll skew your playlist towards a certain genre or a small subset of songs even if the rest of the music on the station doesn't match that song.

It's like certain songs or dimensions are weighted more heavily than others and adding songs with those dimensions skews the entire playlist dataset in a direction that you don't necessarily want. When you have a small group of songs that do that, you can actually make Pandora tell you that you need to add more variety to the station to keep playing music.

Re:Terrible Selection

[hambone142]

I've noticed Pandora overreacts to thumbs up preferences. If I could write them a check for one year's fee, I would but I'm not going to give them my credit card info. Heck, I'd be happy to use PayPal. I just don't wish to get stuck with automatic renewal.

Re:Terrible Selection

[JoeMerchant]

The thing I hate about mixes is their lack of proportional control. I'd like to hear a _little_ Reggae, not 1/2 Reggae, or even 1/5 Reggae, maybe one Reggae song every three hours. I've got a great Reggae station in Pandora, but as soon as it's in a mix, it seriously overdoes its presence.

Re:Terrible Selection

[JoeMerchant]

That one was tough for me as well - I used to pay annually, but now they've pushed me into monthly... I tried Spotify for awhile after they did that, and then decided to get over the whole monthly charge thing and stick with the product I preferred. Now they're up to $60/year - when I originally signed up they were at $30/year - and I certainly haven't noticed a doubling of my value received. If they keep going, Spotify et.al. are going to get a much more serious trial run.

Re:Terrible Selection

[mrprogrammerman]

They added a thumbprint radio station that selects the stuff you like from your other stations. That way you can keep genres separate but still get a mix.

Re:I Like The Old Days of Internet Radio

[JoeMerchant]

iHeartRadio.com

It's very trendy to hate on Pandora, but...

[old_skul]

...they're growing 5% in listener hours year-to-year, and had 9.3+ BILLION (with a B) $USD in ad revenue, FY 2015. You can complain all you want about them, but they are a huge force in the advertising industry and for listeners alike.

Adding a pay service is going to be a revenue generator, but only a fraction of users will opt for it. Few people really care about a commercial every 15 minutes.

Yes, yes, it's very edgy and trendy to hate on the service, but facts are facts.

Re:It's very trendy to hate on Pandora, but...

[ColdWetDog]

I don't particularly care if my tastes are similar to only a fraction of users. But I hate ads. Passionately.

So, a service that supports my weird desires and habits gets my vote.

Jango

[Anonymous Coward]

Pandora is not worth $0 while Jango still lives.

Re:Jango

[Oswald McWeany]

Pandora is not worth $0 while Jango still lives.

I'm pretty sure Obi Wan killed him already.

Re:Jango

[rsborg]

Pandora is not worth $0 while Jango still lives.

How is Jango any better than Pandora or Spotify Radio?

I was a paid Pandora user

[waspleg]

until they billed me for a year without my consent by changing my shit to auto-renewal without notice or asking (I was already getting tired of the small circle of songs on most of my stations anyway).

I canceled and never looked back. I don't stream shit now - fuck that - I'd rather have the files and the quality and control that go with them.

Can you still open their .xml and see the next umpteen songs you're gonna get whether you like or not? =)