For some time now, it’s been rumored that Pandora is working on a competitor to the likes of services offered by Spotify et al. While Pandora Plus, launching today, doesn’t appear to be that, fans of the Internet Radio service will be happy to hear that it’s still alive and well, and offering them more for their money. Those familiar with Pandora will no doubt have heard of Pandora One, or even be subscribed to the service. Pandora Plus is effectively replacing Pandora One, and users that are already on that service will be transitioned over to this new offering from Pandora.
In the simplest terms, Pandora Plus is pretty much what the name suggests; it’s more of what many have come to know and love. According to the Press Release, Pandora Plus will offer users more skips, as well as the ability to listen to music offline. This offline element of course requires a little more work from the user, but should you be driving along and lose signal, the app will automatically transition you over to one of your preferred playlists that is already cached for offline play. For $4.99 a month, users will get more skips, more replays and the aforementioned offline capabilities, but it’s not clear as of right now just how many skips and replays Pandora Plus will include. Pandora themselves are calling this a “product transformation”, which could lead to speculation that the firm is still going to launch their much-rumored Spotify competitor later this year. Pandora will hold an event on September 20th as the market closes, so we could learn more come next week.
The Android and iOS apps for Pandora’s services won’t gain access to these new feature right away, rather Pandora has cautioned that it will be arriving “in the coming months” however, those listening on the web should see the new features go live as soon as today. Pandora One, as of today, will become Pandora Plus and those already on this service will automatically move from the old to the new, but those in Australia and New Zealand need to wait until 2017 to see the new features, for whatever reason.