After months of rumors and speculation, Pandora announced last month that it was working on a replacement for its aging Pandora One premium plan. The fruit of that labor is Pandora Plus, and the service is launching today in the US.
The new service, which costs $4.99 per month and comes with unlimited skips, replays and a basic offline listening mode, is also trading in its traditional all-white logo for something a bit more colorful.
"Music is a personal experience for everyone, from the artists creating it all the way to the fans listening to it. And as Pandora continues to evolve the most personal music experience, our new look embraces the dynamic range of sound and color, visualizing the energy and emotion that artists pour into the creation of music, and that we feel as listeners,” Pandora wrote on its blog earlier today.
“Our dynamic brand is composed of form, color and pattern, which we implemented into the new P icon and serves as your portal into the unique and diverse range of music you love.”
Even though most of today’s fanfare was surrounding the launch of Pandora Plus, the free version of Pandora, the one 80 million subscribers use, will also get a few new features including the ability to watch an advertisement to replenish the amount of skips they have for that day.
As far as we know, Pandora Plus, the re-brand and the changes to the free version of the service are building up to a larger announcement from the streaming site later this year – an on-demand streaming service that it hopes will rival Apple Music, Tidal and Spotify.
For now though, we’ll just have to settle for a more colorful app icon and a whole bunch of skips.
- Here’s our round-up of the best music streaming services
