Pandora is one of the oldest and most recognizable names in the streaming music category, and it continues to grow and evolve. Originally famous for its recommendation engine, the Music Genome Project, it led the vanguard for internet radio in the mid-to-late 2000s. Many rival apps have since caught up and surpassed Pandora in terms of features, but the service contains playlists, podcasts, album commentary, and artist tour info that help it stay relevant. These offerings may not truly challenge the features from top services, such as LiveXLive, Spotify, Tidal, or even its SiriusXM Internet Radio parent company, but Pandora is a strong app that has a presence on numerous devices.
A New Plan
Pandora has free and premium service levels, so you can explore the music whether or not you want to sign up for a subscription. Free account holders enjoy the expected ad-supported personalized stations, plus podcasts and the ability to play music on demand. Pandora is similar to Spotify, a PCMag Editors' Choice pick, in that regard.
With that said, Pandora makes you jump through a few hoops before you can enjoy your free music. In order to hear Wu-Tang Clan’s Top Songs playlist, we had to redeem a temporary Premium account and watch a video ad to enjoy some uninterrupted music. This is done with a simple mouse click, or button prompt on phone apps, but it feels unnecessarily obtuse considering most other services just play the ad by default rather than asking you about it first.
The $4.99-per-month Pandora Plus is a more traditional plan that builds on the free tier by adding ad-free personalized stations, unlimited skips, and offline listening. Pandora's highest-level plan, Premium, costs $9.99 per month, and adds playlist creation and sharing to Pandora Plus' feature set. The fact that the playlist creation feature is locked behind Pandora's priciest tier is highly disappointing. LiveXLive, an Editors' Choice pick, has a similar, annoying limitation. Spotify does not.
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Pandora also offers discounted Premium plans for students ($4.99 per month), active military members and vets ($7.99 per month), and families ($14.99 per month, for six people).
Good Features, Odd GUI
You begin your musical journey by browsing Pandora's many categories, or typing the name of an artist or song into the search box. For instance, our "Prince" search caused Pandora to display results that included albums, songs, an artist page, and a Prince-based station. This is typical of what you'd find in competing streaming music services.
Pandora has a solid recommendation feature, courtesy of its Music Genome Project foundation, that gives you bullets of artists similar to what you’re listening to. While listening to Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Pandora listed Michael and Janet Jackson, Sheila E., Marvin Gaye, and Earth Wind and Fire as similar artists, making it a cinch to find more music to keep our groove going.
The music player showcases album art in the middle of the page, with easily accessible lyrics, player controls, song favorite/ban icons, and song and artist information just south of it. The Pandora website is a fairly spartan interface, but that’s not a bad thing. Many other services feed you extensive content via panel-driven interfaces, and while Pandora does too, it scales things back and places the focus on what you’re listening to and what you want to hear.
Unfortunately, Pandora's interface also has too many different appearances. There are various different color schemes we've come across during testing, and another handful of page layouts that differ wildly by whether you're browsing, or on the Artist, Album, Now Listening, My Collections (listening history and saved albums or stations), or some other page. It's jarring and a little irritating.
In addition, the Pandora website was occasionally unresponsive, or loaded pages at a snail's pace over the course of several testing days. It was fine in general, though there were times where we would sit awkwardly waiting for a track to play, only to realize moments later that the page didn’t register the mouse clicking.
Audio Matters
Music satisfactorily streamed over our home connections in testing. Unless you're an audiophile, Pandora's sound quality should satisfy, especially when the audio is pumped through a phone or desktop speaker. On the desktop side, Pandora plays 64k AAC+ for free listeners.
Paid subscribers enjoy three mobile bit rate tiers that impact the music's sound quality. You can select Low (32Kbps AAC+), Standard (64Kbps AAC+), or High (192Kbps MP3) audio settings. The Low setting is good for people who don't want the music streams to chew through their data plans, while the High setting is all about sound quality, data caps be damned. The Standard setting, naturally, is a balance between Low and High.
Unfortunately, people who possess more discerning ears should look elsewhere for their tunes. Pandora lacks Hi-Res Audio, a better-than-CD-quality music class. Only a handful of streaming music services carry Hi-Res Audio catalogs, including Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Qobuz, and Tidal, but the category is growing.
Mobile Apps and Cool Extras
Pandora's offers apps for a tremendous variety of devices, including Android, iOS, Sonos, and Xbox. We tested Pandora on several platforms, and it was a pleasant experience. The mobile app is easy to navigate, and quite attractive, too, more so than the web version.
There are a few additional features that complement the musical listening too, like podcasts. Much like Spotify, Pandora has a rich podcast well that features popular shows, such as The Breakfast Club, Serial, This American Life, and Welcome to Night Vale. It also contains podcasts that originally debuted on SiriusXM (its parent company), such as Marvel/Method and Wu-Tang: The Saga Continues. If the live music experience is more your bag, Pandora lists artist tour dates and links to where you can purchase tickets. It's not unlike iHeartRadio, in this regard, though Pandora makes this more convenient by listing these directly under the artist you’re currently listening to, assuming they have something coming up.
Our favorite Pandora feature is Pandora Stories, which sees artists deliver insights into the making of an album. For example, the Mary J. Blige episode celebrates the 25th anniversary of her classic My Life album, and highlights the processes that led to its creation. Interspersed between her reflections are tracks from the album. Pandora Stories is similar to LiveXLive's Stories, except that artists deliver the information instead of DJs.
Unplugged
Pandora has a few cool things going for it, including good mobile apps, reasonably priced plans, Pandora Stories, and artist tour information. By all means, fire it up if all you want is an incredibly simple lean-back listening experience—though we recommend the app over the website. Still, this expanded iteration of the service isn't quite on the level of the best of its competition. SiriusXM Internet Radio is our Editors' Choice pick for live, satellite radio, while Spotify remains our top, overall pick due to its collaborative playlists, deep podcast well, and video.
Pandora offers a relatively basic feature set, plus a few, intriguing extras to help it compete with the big dogs in the streaming music pack.
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