As a music lover, I am always looking for easy and innovative ways to listen to a wide variety of styles of music. I am a fan of both Pandora and Spotify though they have different pros and con. Also, both companies have an upgrade option for a certain cost each month.
Pandora:
Pandora is known for its shuffle power. Whenever you're are feeling in the mood for a certain genre, era, artist, group, or style of music Pandora has the ability to play at random anything and everything within the station title you chose. The downside is that you can't choose specific songs that you want to listen to and only has a library size of 1,000,000+. One of the biggest problems for me is also that there is a limit to how many times you can use the skip button. You are allotted 6 skips per hour, per station but only 30 skips in 24 hours Though you can upgrade to Pandora One which partially addresses the skip issue and gets rid of ads. Also with the SoundHoud and Spotify iPhone apps, you can connect them and whenever you SoundHoud a song it will automatically add to a Spotify playlist.
Pandora One
Cost: $4.99 per month
Added Features:
Ad Free
More Skips - This allows you to skip songs more frequently than on regular Pandora , but you still have a limit on skips.
Fewer Timeouts - This means Pandora will less frequently ask you "Are you still listening?" when your device is unattended.
Better Sound Quality - In music, the higher the volume of kilobits, the better. Regular Pandora only has 64 kbps (kilobits per second) and Pandora One has 192 kbps.
Free Trial for 7 Days - When trying out Pandora One you can get a free trail for 7 days.
Spotify:
A quality I love about Spotify is its ability to let listeners chose individual songs from their large bank of available music. Spotify has a library size of about 20,000,000. They also provide playlists made for specific tasks, moods, seasons, times of the day, and more. Such as, dance playlists, workout playlists, autumn leaves playlist, coffee break playlist, gentle acoustic playlist, and so on. Spotify also has this nifty feature called Discover Weekly in which they release a playlist each Monday on each and every listener's account that has a list of music based on songs and playlists choices they made that past week. A downside would be that not all music in existence is available on Spotify because not all artists chose to release their music on Spotify's platform; that and ads. However, with Spotify Premium you can get rid of ads.
Spotify Premium
Cost: $9.99 per month
Special Features:
Ad Free
Play Any Song - This features allows you to choose and play any song, single, or from an album, that is provided on Spotify.
Download Music and Listen Offline - On Spotify Premium you can download music to be able to listen to your favorites while not connected to wifi or without using data.
Better Sound Quality - In music the higher the volume of kilobits the better and on regular Spotify the sound quality is measured at 160 kbps and the premium is measured at 320 kbps.
Free Trail for 30 Days - When switching over to Spotify Premium, you can text it out for free for 30 days.
In conclusion and in my opinion, I find that Spotify is preferable to Pandora because it has better sound quality, has the ability to be more selective, is available in more countries, has a larger library size by millions of songs, and has unlimited skips. Though I do recognize that whichever one you prefer totally depends on who you are and your specific style and mood at different times in your life.
I also took a twitter poll and found that out of 21 votes, 67% preferred Spotify and 33% prefer Pandora.
