Pandora App Music & Podcasts

Before September 2011, you had to pay $0.99 for unlimited listening. For free listeners it was 40 hours a month. As of currently, paid features include a removal of ads, unlimited skips between music as well as offline listening and three offline stations with Pandora Plus. Pandora Premium included the benefits of Plus and additionally offers listening to and creating playlists of individual songs on demand. The playlists can be shared too.

In an era so technologically advanced, music availability is practically at everyone’s fingertips. That, combined with the increasingly popularity of TedTalks and podcasts, music applications are a big business in the modern world and as such, it is only natural that multiple applications offering the same services are developed. Thanks to this, competition is developed between the developers and they compete in a never-ending race to establish their app as the best. While the most popular and global music apps are currently Spotify and Apple Music (for various reasons), we also have a strong contender in Pandora Music & Podcasts. 

The application offers two plans: 

• Free: Supported by advertisements 

• Paid: No advertisements 

The app allows for free streaming of music, tuning into pre-established radio stations of different genres, creating your own custom stations or tune in to other listeners’ music stations. The tracks can be given thumbs up or thumbs down and the station will be tailored according to your choices. Thumbs down allows for immediate skipping of the song and 2 thumbs down bans the artist’s music from the station. 

Censorship: Explicit songs can be censored. 

Purchasing the music: The app gives you options to purchase the music you are listening to as is done by Amazon or iTunes. 

Apart from this, the app goes to great lengths in choosing the best music for you, considering over 450 attributes. 

A feature introduced in 2016 which gave additional options as well subscription plans included a plan called Pandora Plus, an ad-free experience of the app as well as offline playing of music. They also launched an on-demand service, on which was based their Pandora Premium plan and allows users to create playlists of individual songs on demand. 

It offers options for both paying and non-paying users – therefore, even if you cannot pay and enjoy the app 100%, it still proves to be a good experience. 

Furthermore, the option to censor explicit music makes this more youngster-friendly. It allows to make highly personalized playlists with its music, artists, albums and even podcasts. 

The availability of podcasts is another salient feature – sometimes one prefers to listen to something calmer. The streaming quality, overall, is stable, including in the high quality mode. If you’re willing to pay for Pandora Premium, you can also use the app offline, and the subscription is cheap. 

Free users have only a limited amount of skips. Although you can get more skips by watching ads, they are not limitless. 

Probably its biggest limitation so far is the fact that it is not available outside of the US. Apart from this, it does not allow you to delete your search history ad recently the app has been seeing a lot of crashes, freezes, glitches for a lot of people. People are experiencing it taking over other apps, not working on their devices, connectivity issues etc. Furthermore, you cannot edit your playlist track order on mobile devices (possible on web version). 

The company was first founded in 2000, named Savage Beast Technologies, with the notion of creating a radio station for each individual. In February 2019, it was purchased by Sirius XM Holdings for $3.5 billion. In the initial stages of the service, a free user was limited to only 40 hours of listen time. You had to pay $0.99 for unlimited listening. That feature was eventually abolished in September 2011, made a comeback in March 2013 but was again abolished in late 2013. As of 2019, it has had 63.5 million active monthly users, along with 6.2 million paying users.