- Spotify Vs Pandora Vs Iheartradio
- Spotify Compared To Pandora
- Spotify Vs Pandora Data Usage
- Spotify Free Vs Pandora Free
Pandora offers 4 different tiers of service: free ad-supported Pandora, Pandora Plus, Pandora Premium and Pandora Family Plan. Pandora Free is ad-supported radio service which allows users to create stations based off of their favorite artists, songs, and genres. Pandora Plus ($4.99/month or $54.89/year) gives users the ability to replay tracks, listen to 4 radio stations offline, and the. Amazon's Prime Music vs Pandora and Spotify: Is Good Enough Enough? The online retailer has launched a free music service for its Prime customers, which could steal business from the established.
Pandora is a radio-based streaming service, and Spotify is playlist oriented, so they work very differently in some ways. Any how, both Spotify and Pandora intend to help users find their favorite jams and to discover tons of new music with ease. Which one is the best music streaming service? Which one is your preference?
Here we make the side by side comparisons between Spotify and Pandora. After considering variety of factors, you will make the right choice!
The Comparison Table of Pandora and Spotify
Free plan | Ad-supported, limited to radio functionality, no offline mode | Ad-supported, suffle-only mode, no offline mode |
Monthly fee | Pandora Premium $9.99, Pandora Plus $4.99 | Spotify Premium $9.99 |
Family plan | $14.99 for 6 family members | $14.99 for 6 family members |
Students plan | $4.99 per month | $4.99 per month (includs Hulu) |
Free trial | 60 days | 30 days |
Music library | Over 40 million licensed tracks | Over 50 million licensed tracks |
Sound quality | 64kbps for free users, 192kbps for Pandora Plus and Premium users | 192 Kbps in Ogg for Free, 320 Kbps in Ogg for Premium |
Offline listening | Yes, with paid subscription | Yes, with paid subscription |
Supported devices | Android and iOS devices, computers (not available for Free users), Kindle devices, Google Home, Chromecast, Sonos, Amazon Fire TV, Xbox One, Fitbit | Android and iOS devices, computers, TV, Amazon Echo, PS4, Xbox One, Sonos, Chromecast, Apple Watch and more |
Availability | US, Australia, New Zealand | Nearly 80 countries |
Side by Side Comparisons between Pandora and Spotify
Pandora provides simple yet perfect interface. 'Now Playing' tab displays what you’re currently playing, including thumbs up and thumbs down buttons, and the album art in the center of the main interface, with additional backstage which give users an access to the artist’s lyrics, tour dates, bios, and more. It claimed that the improved 'Navigation' feature makes things easier when users create and organize stations, look at their favorite tracks, and use playback controls. However, users do not think so and some even think that the UI on the desktop version 'make things more difficult and take more actions to do the same thing for the sake of aesthetics'.
Spotify has updated the user interface since January 2019. The positions of a few useful buttons have changed, making it more difficult for users to navigate the features they want, for example, the Artist/Albums pages are set up in 'Your Library' section, and the 'Repeat' and 'Go to queue' buttons on mobile app are moved into the sub. It seems that this is the first time that people strongly complain about the changes.
Verdict: By all accounts, both Pandora and Spotify have made unnecessary compromises for the sake of aesthetic changes. Users just wanna go back to the past version. In conclusion, though Pandora has beautiful and appealing UI, most of users prefer to Spotify which displays all features more conspicuously.
2. Pandora vs Spotify: Costs
Pandora offers 4 different tiers of service: free ad-supported Pandora, Pandora Plus, Pandora Premium and Pandora Family Plan.
Pandora Free is ad-supported radio service which allows users to create stations based off of their favorite artists, songs, and genres. https://pulsebrown156.weebly.com/blog/get-free-spotify-premium-code.
Pandora Plus ($4.99/month or $54.89/year) gives users the ability to replay tracks, listen to 4 radio stations offline, and the benefit to enjoy higher quality audio and a longer timeout period.
Pandora Premium ($9.99/month or $109.89/year with a 60-day free trial) covers all the benefits of Pandora Plus, and pluses the ability to search and play songs on-demand. With Pandora Premium users can create fully customizable playlists, access as much of their music collection offline, and enjoy higher quality audio and longer timeouts than Pandora Plus subscribers.
Spotify Vs Pandora Vs Iheartradio
Pandora Premium Family ($14.99 USD monthly or $164.89 annually) offers all of the features of Pandora Premium to up to six unique Pandora accounts.
Spotify Compared To Pandora
Spotify Premium for individual is $9.99 per month. Spotify Family allows up to create five additional individual accounts for a total of $14.99 per month. If you’re a student, you can sign up with a .edu email address which allows you a student discount with $4.99 (includes Hulu) per month.
Spotify is testing a new Premium deal which offers a cheaper subscription to couples. Dubbed Premium Duo, it sits between the existing solo and Family subscriptions, and is ideal for those without kids.
You Might Interested in: How to Get a Discount on Spotify Premium
1. Things You Need to Know about Spotify and Hulu Bundle
![Pandora Pandora](/uploads/1/3/3/9/133905897/177758578.jpg)
Spotify and Hulu have partnered to offer a combined streaming media service that could save your money to access your favorite streaming music and videos. So here we will mainly talk about things you need to know about Spotify and Hulu bundle.
Learn More >2. If you have new Samsung Galaxy S10, S10+, or S10e and you could get your first 6 months of Premium absolutely free.
3. Spotify is teaming up with AT&T, so if you’re an eligible AT&T customer, you can sign up for a free six-month trial of Spotify Premium.
3. Pandora vs Spotify: Music Catalog and Music Discovery
The size of a music catalog is crucial when comparing two services. Spotify claims over 30 million songs, while touting the addition of another 20,000 songs to its library daily, so it seems that users can literally find anything and everything. Pandora also offers on-demand access to more than 40 million songs, and millions of curated and auto-generated radio stations that offer variations on a theme.
In summary, both Spotify and Pandora accomplish two different tasks: Pandora is for radio, and Spotify is for playlists, but the key points to keep subscribers sticking to their services depend on the ability to discovery new music. Spotify build the personalized playlists like Discovery Weekly and Release radar which provide new music from artists they never stumbled across on their own. While Pandora's 'Music Genome Project' is a powerful engine offering the incredible ability to provide listeners with songs they like based on a vast amount of variables. In addition to creating radio stations, the 'Music Genome Project' helps to curate playlists automatically adding music once you have selected a few songs.
Verdict: Pandora does a better job in discovering music. The 'radio mode' introduces listeners millions of interesting music, then you do not have to worry about what to listen to.
Best Add-ons or Third-Party Apps for Discovering New Music on Spotify
In addition to the built-in features that Spotify holds, there are plenty of third-party add-ons, or web-based tools which are using Spotify official API or not. Here we list the best 8 add-ons or web-based tools for Spotify, which are working with Spotify and bring your streaming music to a new level.
Learn More >By default, Spotify music player runs at 160kbps on desktop, but Premium allows you to up this to 320kbps, which is the best compression rate you’ll actually notice. For Spotify mobile app, Low quality is 24kbps, Normal quality is 96kbps, High quality is 160kbps, and Extreme quality is 320kbps. Free users can select Normal or High, but only Premium lets you select Extreme on mobile.
For Pandora, its audio quality might be the lowest available among the major streaming music service, even the Premium subscribers stream music at only 192Kbps in AAC format.
Verdict: It is apparent that Spotify offers the better audio quality. If you are particular about the audio quality, Spotify is your choice.
How to Improve the Streaming and Download Audio Quality on Spotify?
If you want all your music from Spotify sound amazing, you can take multiple methods to improve sound quality. And here we list the best ways you can refer to change or improve the streaming or download audio quality on Spotify.
Learn More >Spotify Vs Pandora Data Usage
Sometimes the smart speakers you own also decides which music streaming service you should choice, because you need to consider whether your speaker is natively compatible with the service. Spotify is available everywhere, and available on most of devices including desktop, mobile phone or tablets, TV and game console, smart speaker and watch. Pandora Premium was on a select few platforms, but now it's also available on iOS, Android, desktop, web browser, Sonos, Kindle devices, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Xbox One, Google Home, Fitbit and more.
Verdict: Tunes go download from spotify music converter. Relatively speaking, Spotify is compatible with most of mainstream smart speaks, TV and game consoles, wearable devices, so it has mass appeal and happily reaches very broad users.
6. Pandora vs Spotify: Podcast
Podcast that a service provides are a critical element when you consider which platforms you will choose. It may not be ready to switch over from a dedicated app just yet, but it's a nice feature for anyone looking to trim down the number of apps they use daily. Spotify seizes the initiative and heavily invests to provide listeners high-quality podcasts with different topics. It seems that Pandora has not lagged behind at all. In 2018, Pandora announced that it has hundreds of podcasts with over 100,000 episodes across genres like true crime, technology, music, and more. Users can discover podcasts throughout the app of Spotify and Pandora, in this round, the draw is a good result.
How to Download Spotify Podcast to PC without Premium?
How to download podcasts from Spotify on your computer to listen to it offline? Now here is the solution: Sidify Music Converter is an impressive application which downloads Spotify podcast to audio tracks like MP3, AAC, WAV or FLAC.
Learn More >7. Conclusion: Pandora or Spotify, Which One Should You Choose?
Spotify deserves to the pioneer and king in the music-streaming space, although it is not to everybody's taste. Spotify is for playlist, so if you are the ones who want a solid all-around service, and love to make, browse and share playlists to others, Spotify is your choice. Pandora's 'Music Genome Project' is a trump card to give better recommendations. If you are tired of discovering new music and do not know what to listen to, Pandora will give you more suggestions.
If Spotify is a popular choice to avoid 'landmines', Pandora is special-interest to meet a specific need.
Recommend: Spotify Music Downloader
Sidify Music Converter is a wonderful Spotify audio converter on Windows & Mac, which can download Spotify songs to other playable formats, thus users can play the downloaded songs on other devices, such as the iPod, iPhone, Zune, PSP, etc.
Sidify Music Converter
- Download Spotify song or playlist to MP3/AAC/WAV/FLAC.
- Keep 100% original audio quality of Spotify after conversion.
- Keep all ID3 tags and metadata to well organize music library.
- Burn Spotify music to CD and share Spotify music via Email.
Related Articles
Pandora is really giving Spotify a run for its money, but what is the difference? Well, looking at Spotify and Pandora Premium, we come to the reality that both of them are popular music streaming services tailored to help subscribers find their favorite jam. Users of both services have the chance to discover a huge number of new music without putting in much effort. As a music lover, both services are worth using. But if you want to upgrade to paid tiers of Pandora or Spotify, you must know what is good for you.
Spotify Free Vs Pandora Free
Here we are comparing Spotify and Pandora Premium in detail, including their music catalogue, user experience, subscription plans, and more, so that you could know which to choose when halting between these two music services. Spotify error code 30 mac.
Spotify vs Pandora Premium: Origin
Pandora has changed the music industry since it debuted in 2000, making a new standard for online music streaming. Since the year 2000, a number of competitors have come up including iHeartRadio, TuneIn and Last.fm plus others copying its 'radio station' features, where a few have managed to succeed. Pandora boasts of being top when it comes to radio-style programming.
On the other hand, Spotify was brought to birth by two Swedish with an aim to listen to all their favorite jam in one place. The idea that worked perfectly, making the Spotify one of the best on-demand music streaming platforms in the world since 2008. Spotify boasts of having over 140 million active daily users and 87 million and above paying monthly subscribers, surety that it is indeed ahead of the game.
Spotify vs Pandora: How They Work
Pandora has a patented music database dubbed music genome project which uses a complex algorithm to search for an artist or songs. To use it you need to create a radio station first. Music genome project compiles information on tracks by first classifying them to a genre. Most songs have several attributes that help Pandora tell the similarities as well as differences between any two songs.
If you are a user you are able to customize your radio station by either giving thumbs up or thumbs down to tracks that are selected for you. You can share your station with your buddy. The badness is that linking to other songs is impossible with Pandora due to legality.
In the comparison of Spotify and Pandora, Spotify relies on a large music catalog of about 40 million songs to facilitate discovery of new songs and beat traditional music players. There is also a fact that some countries restrict their artist from making deals with such music streaming Service Company. But users can still create a Spotify account and use any compatible device to stream music online.
Spotify vs Pandora: Music Catalogue
Since it was launched, Spotify has been enjoying music streaming business space, especially when it comes to the music catalog. It has a vast number of songs in its ever growing music library. While Pandora catalog in its existence having one to two million songs making it hard to beat Spotify. Only Apple Music has managed to get close to Spotify with other competitors still struggling with little degree of success.
Spotify also boasts of a wide range of remixes and covers which you can never find in Pandora Premium. However, both Spotify and Pandora Premium music library are comparable even though the fact remains Spotify holds the lead.
Spotify vs Pandora: Cost
When it comes to cost (or the subscription fee), both have almost the same rates. Both Spotify and Pandora cost $9.99 a month accompanied a 60-day free trial. However, the differences come where Pandora offers its existing Pandora plus subscribers six months free trial when Spotify gives only 30 days free trial to its new users.
Again if you are a die-hard fan of music and you want a one-year premium service upfront Spotify will charge you $99 a year but of course with $20 discount while Pandora Premium will want you to cough $109.89 a year.
There is no difference in the monthly family plan, both services charge the same price. Pandora family plan goes for $14.99 a month for six members same to Spotify which gives a similar rate. Spotify has got no annual rate while Pandora annual family plan cost $164.89a year.
The difference in pricing is able to help you tell what to go for.
Spotify vs Pandora: Restrictions
Speaking of restrictions, here we actually mean the listening limit of both music services. To be specific, regarding the two subscription plans of Pandora, the freemium is supported by advertisements, while the premium is ad-free. That's the only difference between the two plans.
However, when referring to Spotify, it puts more obvious differences between its free and premium accounts. For free users of Spotify, they are restricted to listen to the music online with ads. At the same time, paid users of Spotify are allowed to stream the ad-free songs with higher quality, as well as download the tracks for offline listening.
Useful Tips to Download Spotify Music Offline with Free Accounts
If you are using free plan of Spotify, and want to enjoy ad-free songs with the same quality as premium users, you can use a 3rd-party Spotify music tool such as TunesKit Spotify Music Downloader to extract and download the Spotify songs as MP3 losslessly. It works perfectly for both free and premium accounts of Spotify music.
- See Also: How to Download Spotify Offline without Premium
Spotify vs Pandora: User Interface and Experience
Well, this is not a big deal but it's important to note the difference between Spotify and Pandora in terms of user experience, despite the fact that they all look great.
Pandora gives you three versions for playing music: in-browser player, downloadable desktop application and mobile app for Android and iOS. However, this is strictly for Pandora Plus or Premium subscribers. With easy-to-use interface plus intuitive control of all the versions, the entire version gives you the same experience. Its user interface enables you to sort radio stations the way you like from alphabetical order to calendar dates, just for easy access. Pandora allows you to access background information regarding the artist you are listening to, giving you links so that you can quickly purchase according to the song of the artists of your choice. The browse and my station icons also allow you to switch between listening and discovering so fast.
When it comes to Spotify, it also has three versions: desktop, web player and mobile apps for iOS and Android. Both apps have a polished user interface. The desktop client works like iTunes. You will find it easy to navigate and operate. When you keep on searching for playlist or track on the program's search bar, you will start seeing Google-like results, albums, tracks, and auto-generating artists as you type.
Spotify has widely researched and developed exact features that you need and can never get elsewhere. By developing a radio-style algorithm with 'endless artist radio' feature, users are able to create their own playlist which can be downloaded for playback. This is proof that Spotify has given its users a more calculated user experience. Looking at Spotify and Pandora, the earlier is a stable platform with a slick interface which makes the whole stuff looks great unlike its competitors including Pandora.
Conclusion & Suggestion: Which is Better for You
With all that told, there is more than meets the eye with Spotify vs Pandora Premium race. Pandora can't stand Spotify's flamboyant versatility as well as usability. Even though Pandora made one step ahead by introducing Pandora Premium to users which offers a wide collection of specific jams and albums, it still remains far behind Spotify. If you are truly a die-hard music fan then opt for Spotify which has better applications, better social features and user-friendly interface. But if you are in love with radio style, Pandora will sort you out, though Spotify reigns.
Adam Gorden is an experienced writer of TunesKit who is obsessed about tech, movie and software.