THE PREMIUM TREATMENT

Pandora Premium—defined by Pandora as "a combination of the Pandora radio you already love, the ability to search and play any track or album and a set of playlist features tailored to your preferences"—is now widely available. Until now, the service, which makes them a direct competitor with Spotify, Apple Music et al, was only accessible via invite.

For $9.99 a month, the company is offering a highly personalized musical safe haven of sorts, using their Music Genome Project and data collected from 81m listeners.

In “My Music,” users will find every station they’ve ever created, their albums and songs, as well as their self-curated playlists. Among those playlists, they'll also find a “My Thumbs Up” playlist—"a collection of every song you’ve ever thumbed up across all your stations"—which is automatically dropped in there by Pandora.

Like their competitors, Pandora Premium too boasts an offline feature for when you hop on a plane or just plumb lose a signal.

And the Tim Westergren-founded company is priding itself on improving their search function, increasing accuracy by filtering out karaoke tracks, random covers, etc.


This development occurs in tandem with the launch of the Internet radio giant's Sounds Like You campaign. Artists including Big Sean (seen in the ad above), Gorillaz, Miranda Lambert, Questlove, 2 Chainz, Amine, Bishop Briggs, Brett Eldredge, Daya, Halsey, Keith Urban, Kelsea Ballerini, Lil Yachty, Maggie Rogers, Nicky Jam, Pitbull, Thomas Rhett and Ziggy Marley teamed up with Pandora to share their musical influences and inspirations and to promote the new Premium service and its unique understanding of the listener. Notably, each act posed for photos with a Pandora "P" made of the art used for their most beloved albums.

By the way, although everyone and their mother seems to find this all ridiculously user-friendly, we keep holding up our raised thumbs in front of the computer screen when we like something and nothing happens. What we do wrong?