Pandora Premium Now Comes With On-Demand Streaming For $9.99 Per Month

Here is some good news for music aficionados -- Pandora’s Premium tier now has on-demand streaming for a price of $9.99 per month. What this means is that apart from allowing subscribers to listen to any recommended tracks from Pandora, customers can also select the music they actually want to listen to. With its latest move, Pandora joins its rival Spotify and Apple Music in providing an on-demand music streaming option for customers. 

Within this week, Pandora is looking to send out invitations to customers for a free trial. In the next few weeks, all subscribers of Pandora will start to have the option of upgrading their Pandora accounts to include on-demand streaming.

For those not following Pandora closely, it already offers a paid tier -- Pandora Plus. This option comes with a price of $4.99 per month, and allows subscribers to listen to songs offline, avoid ads, and even skip more tracks compared to the free version of Pandora. As for the more recent Pandora Premium, the company first launched it back in December of last year. After completing its acquisition of Rdio in 2015, Pandora then proceeded to morph that service into a package that would eventually into Pandora Premium, an option that brings an extensive library of on-demand songs, as well as an interface that takes full advantage of Pandora’s own expansive experience in recommending tracks by way of its online radio service. As of three months ago, almost 80 million users around the world have already accessed the ad supported version of Pandora.

Pandora was considered by many as one of the more innovative and forward thinking music streaming service providers out there, but due to some strict licensing rules, it ultimately limited the user’s control over what tracks can be streamed. But by the time other competitor brands such as Spotify and Apple Music emerged, they were able to ink more flexible agreements that basically let their respective listeners pick the songs they want to hear, as many times as they like. 

Because of this, Pandora has seen its growth stalled a bit. Still, the company is making some efforts to inject some growth in its business. Some reports indicate that Pandora is open to the idea of a merger, and in February of this year, it had stated that it had plans of removing seven percent of its current personnel in order to make itself a more attractive target for potential buyers.