Pandora Smartphone App Review

About

For music explorers who are keen on discovering new tunes, Pandora has you covered. Pandora is an online music streaming application that creates custom radio stations based on music genres, artists, albums and songs. Pandora is not your typical music streaming app, however, and while it does have a unique purpose and an innovative idea, the service is not without its incapabilities and therefore isn't for everyone.

Features

Pandora allows you to create personalised radio stations that adapt based on your preferences. To begin, all you need to do is select a genre, artist, album or song and Pandora will start to play you tracks. Like what it plays? Hit thumbs up to hear more similar music. Don't like it? Hit thumbs down so the next suggestions aren't similar. Simple stuff.

Pandora is all about exploring new music, and it does it very well. Swiping up on a track reveals a concise artist biography for users to learn about new artists they have discovered. It also shows a list of similar artists which can be explored as well.

Users can then pull up more information about new artists by tapping on them. They are then able to create new stations as well.

Pandora also allows users to leave comments on artists' pages for each other to see. Here we can learn more about the artists and their music from a fan perspective as well.

Users can also use Pandora to listen to popular stations that are already created. These are available through the 'Browse' menu in the app. In addition to the previously noted types of stations, through Browse we can choose stations based on moods, activities, time periods and current popularity.

Where Pandora doesn't appeal to listeners is its inability to play a specific song on demand. Unlike other music streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music, Pandora is only for streaming stations. While this is intended, it suggests that the app may not be for everyone, and may not be able to serve as a complete solution for listening to music.
In addition, the free version of Pandora is overloaded with a plethora of advertisements. Understandably, it is a free app and ads are the price consumers have to pay for using it, however they can tend to be annoying. Popup ads are easily dismissed, and generally do not interrupt the listening experience. However, audio and video ads are very intrusive, and are sometimes played between or even during songs.

For $4.99 per month, users can subscribe to Pandora One, which essentially is the same service with no ads. Pandora One also removes the skip limitation, and enables high quality audio. However where Spotify Premium allows for a bitrate of 320Kbps, Pandora One will not satisfy audiophiles with its inferior bitrate of 192Kbps.

Download Links

Pandora is available for free on Android through the Google Play Store and on iPhone through the iTunes App Store. Pandora One runs through the same app, however needs to be purchased online first.

The Verdict

Pandora is a great app for discovering new music, however for most it cannot serve as a substitute for a more fully featured music app. It's intelligent algorithms and rating systems deliver a personalised experience for exploring new music that is arguably better than other similar features in other apps such as Spotify Radio and Beats Radio 1 on Apple Music. However in terms of the magnitude of other features that these competitor apps entail, Pandora just will not cut it as a complete, go-to smartphone music app.

Rating

★★★☆☆

Reviewed by Juzan