Pandora Tackles Music Streaming Competition with New Premium Family Plan

Pandora is showing it does not intend to be left out by competing music streaming services by introducing its newest promo, officially labeled Premium Family Plan.

Other dominating music streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music have a similar promo, where family members (or sometimes friends and other relatives) can have an all-access pass to premium services by using just one paid subscription.

The arrival of Pandora’s Premium Family Plan was rather “quiet,” as noted by CNET. But basic bits of information on subscribing to the promo are now available on Pandora’s official support page.

Typically, family plans mean discounts, and that is the same case with Pandora’s Premium Family Plan. It is priced at $14.99 per month and will give access to six different Pandora accounts. For comparison, an individual Pandora Premium subscription costs $9.99 per month. Meanwhile, a one-time annual payment will cost $164.89, translating to a free one-month subscription.

Pandora users subscribed to the family plan will each have access to all features and services available on Pandora Premium. The perks include playlist customization, creation of radio stations, listening to music offline, option to skip or repeat songs, and ad-free access to music with higher-quality audio.

The Pandora Premium Family Plan also features the Our Soundtrack services, where the app creates and regularly updates a playlist based on music-listening patterns of the subscriber. CNET added that the Our Soundtrack feature was built with the company’s Music Genome Project, which uses up to 75 algorithms in observing a subscriber’s musical preferences.

Meanwhile, Pandora reminds subscribers that Premium Family Plan membership cannot be accessed if a customer is paying through iTunes, Google Play, Roku or Amazon Appstore. This means customers will have to pay directly through their Pandora accounts.

Moreover, once a Pandora customer has successfully subscribed to the promo, adding other members to the plan can be done through the Pandora website or app. First, a user must log in to their accounts then open the Subscriptions tab. From there, look for the “Manage Family” option, where fields for adding email addresses with "Invite” buttons are available.