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Pandora Launches Unlimited Premium Family Plan For $15 Per Month (betanews.com)
Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Looking to better compete with the likes of Apple Music and Spotify, Pandora has launched a new Premium Family package. The new package offers unlimited access to all of Pandora's premium features for up to six people. The price is just $15 per month, but there's a 60-day free trial available so you can try it out for size first. Pandora explains that the new package offers "all of the features of Pandora Premium to up to six unique Pandora accounts simultaneously" and costs $14.99 USD monthly or $164.89 annually. As noted by Phone Arena, there are no limits on the number of tracks that can be streamed, there are no ads, and subscribers are free to download music for offline listening.
Most of them. I don't know anyone who doesn't get most of their music from a streaming service anymore.
I still buy tracks and download them. But I don't listen to shitty throwaway fad music that is only popular for a couple weeks. I still revisit tracks from decades ago. So the value I get from a $0.80 track is pretty good.
VPN's are so hard. /s
As a long time user of Pandora, and as an American living outside of the US, connecting to a VPN in the States to use State-side services is a daily occurrence and is a brainless operation now. Stop whining.
Actually, after hooking up Alexa, she seems to be able to stream Pandora without a VPN to the States. Nice work around for now, but requires Alexa.
He probably paid the premium for one of those phones with more than 32Gb of storage that are becoming so rare.
I recently put a 200GB SanDisk flash into my cheap Samsung (ATT) prepaid Go phone. There's no streaming needed, and I have all my music with me. I have about 50GB left free on the flash, so I've got a long ways to go yet before it's full. I also have SiriusXM with both a sat radio and the phone app, but streaming is sub-optimal.
I collect music and have done so since the late '80s. I have over a thousand CDs, all of which I've ripped to WAV files, and then converted to MP3s. I continue to purchase CDs at the many local thrift stores, maybe another 50 a year, plus purchase MP3s from Amazon.
When driving, it's just a cable to connect to the radio to play through the car's speakers.
This came in real handy when I had major surgery in mid Feb, and got stuck in the hospital for nine days. At least I had all my music on the phone, and the Kindle app on the tablet for entertainment.
Does anyone still use Pandora?
I started using Pandora again after a couple of years on Apple Music because the song selection of my Apple Radio stations went to hell with the iOS 11 release. The dislike song is apparently non-functional in Apple Radio these days as well.
I tried Spotify for a while and really did not like the UI at all. They did better with song selection than Apple but the playlist for a station seems to be set when you choose one single artist or song as the seed.
Pandora lets you choose multiple artists or songs as seeds for your station. They come up with great songs that is related to the type of music in your station. I've encountered quite a few artists that I'd not previously heard on Pandora.
This family plan might just be the deal to get me to switch away from Apple Music.
Apple's catalog is as big as any of the other services, and except for a few obscure comedy albums, there's never been something I've looked for and not found on the service.
As for access, I live in the suburbs. I commute to a bigger city nearby. 98% of my vacationing is to northern California, Nevada, and Arizona, and there's cell coverage/internet access everywhere but inside the national parks. Regardless, Apple lets you download music from its service to your device, and I do have a few thousand songs from my CD collection available as well for those rare off-the-grid times. I'm never lacking for music.
You're welcome to purchase and modify your few hundred songs if you have an issue with these services. I'll enjoy my 30,000,000+, whenever I want them.
Is this now policy of Slashdot - to sell adds as news items for tech people?
E Proelio Veritas.