A couple of months ago, Pandora announced a new subscription service called Pandora Plus in which for $5 a month, it would give users features like offline playback, song skipping, more replays, and so on. It was also largely considered a stepping stone towards on-demand music streaming, a new service that has been officially announced today.
Dubbed Pandora Premium, this seems to be how Pandora has decided to take the assets they’ve acquired from Rdio and turn it into a new on-demand music streaming service. According to Engadget, the interface is said to look a lot like Rdio, with a redesigned “now playing” screen, but it will also retain the thumbs up and down features for users to mark songs that they like or do not like.
The company claims that they have also made changes to its search experience by personalizing the search based on what users like to listen to, which will hopefully return more relevant results. The new service was announced at a special event in which VIPs and members of the press were invited to take a look.
In terms of pricing and availability, Pandora wasn’t too specific on that. The service is expected to launch some time in Q1 2017 and that’s all we know for now. It is speculated that there is a good chance we could be looking at a similar $9.99/month pricing, but we guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
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