The go-to music app Pandora comes with two paid plans: Plus and Premium. Both these plans allow you to discover new music and listen to your favorite artists.
But what’s the major difference between the two paid plans?
On the one hand, Pandora plus gives you access to some premium features, and Pandora premium additionally provides unlimited skips and some extra cool features. Therefore, making it a better option for music lovers.
Pandora Plus vs Premium: Price
Let’s talk about the cost of these two services. Pandora Premium is $10 a month, while Pandora Plus is $5 monthly. That may seem an obvious choice, but there are more features in Pandora Plus than Premium!
Therefore, a regular Pandora account should be used if you want to get the best deal out of your subscription and don’t care about offline listening or mobile app use (which would require premium).
Pandora Plus vs Premium: Download Options
- If you want to try out Pandora Plus, it’s free to download.
- Pandora Premium is not free. You’ll have to pay for it if you want all the features, but there are several options available: $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year (which offers a significant discount).
Pandora Plus vs Premium: Ad-free Stations
One of the big selling points for Pandora Plus is that it’s ad-free, which is indeed a true statement. If you have pandora premium, ads will be on your station breaks and occasionally between songs.
These ads are not intrusive—they look like a small banner at the bottom of your screen and will only play when you’re listening to music that has ads enabled in its settings.
Pandora Plus vs Premium: Unlimited skips
Unlimited skips are available on both Pandora Plus and Premium. Let’s say you’re in a slump and listening to a song that makes you want to end it all.
You can skip as many times as you want without running out of skips, which is great because the suicide-inducing song won’t be stuck inside your head for eternity.
In addition to unlimited skips being better for skipping songs that make us feel bad, we can also use them for positive reasons!
There will be those days when we wake up feeling refreshed from our sleep and need music to match our moods. Unlimited skips will come in handy when deciding what song should accompany such an exciting morning (or afternoon) run around town!
Pandora Plus vs Premium: Higher quality audio
Pandora Plus is the better deal. Although Pandora Premium offers higher-quality audio, it’s not worth paying extra.
The music experience on both services is nearly identical, so there’s no reason to shell out 20% more money for a service that offers the same but lower quality.
Pandora Plus also comes with skips and replays, which you won’t get on Pandora Premium if you’re listening via your mobile device or desktop computer and not using headphones with a built-in remote control (more on later).
While this may not seem like much at first glance, when you start adding up all those extra free plays, it becomes clear that Pandora Plus offers more for less money.
Offline listening on mobile
Both Pandora Plus and Pandora Premium users can listen to music on their mobile devices without a data connection, but there are some differences between the two plans:
- If you have Pandora Plus, you’ll be able to listen to music offline for up to three months.
- If you have Pandora Premium, you’ll be able to download tracks for offline listening instead of streaming them.
Personalized playlists
If you’re a Pandora Plus subscriber, the app will create customized playlists based on your listening history. These can be limited in scope (for example, they could all be songs from a specific artist or genre), but they won’t be very expansive.
If you’re a Pandora Premium subscriber, not only will your personalized playlists be tailored to your tastes like they were with the free service—they’ll also reflect the music that other people who like what you like are listening to and enjoying.
If an artist has been added multiple times by different users with similar tastes as yours, it might also show up in one of your custom playlists!
Is Pandora Plus the Better Deal?
As you know, Pandora is a music streaming service with two tiers: free and paid. The free tier allows you to listen to Pandora’s curated stations and earn ‘hits’ by liking songs on your feed.
You can skip six songs per hour, which adds up over time if you’re listening to heavy rotation hits like “Sorry” by Justin Bieber or “We Found Love” by Rihanna.
On the Premium side, users get access to an ad-free experience on all platforms (desktop computers, mobile devices), unlimited skips and replays of any song on demand, and offline listening capabilities for $9.99/month ($119.88/year).
This includes all the features from Pandora Plus—but at the double the cost! To top it off, plenty of other streaming services offer similar content at similar prices while being less restrictive regarding what kinds of ads they’ll run (or not run) during your listening sessions.
Pandora Plus vs Premium (My top pick)
Pandora Plus is great for those who want the best of Pandora without paying for the Premium version. It’s cheaper than Premium, but it still has many features that make it worth the price.
The only downside is that if you want to listen offline and on the go, you’ll need Spotify or Apple Music since there’s no offline listening with Pandora Plus (and none with free accounts).
To sum up, Pandora Premium is a little more expensive than Pandora Plus, but it’s worth the cost.
It offers ad-free listening and unlimited skips, plus you can listen to any song on demand.
If you like to listen to music on your phone more often than not, this is a better option!
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