Pandora revamps its $5 subscription service with Pandora Plus

As we anticipated, online radio provider Pandora has today announced some big changes to its $4.99 monthly subscription service. Gone is Pandora One, Pandora Plus is the new ad-free listening experience from the company.

The major changes with Pandora Plus include the introduction of unlimited song skips and replays, so that you can listen to more of what you actually want to hear. The company is also introducing a new offline mode that will keep your music playing even when your connection drops. Pandora calls this its “predictive offline mode”, which basically means that the app saves some tracks from your four most popular stations for offline listening. The app alerts listeners that they’re being switched to an offline station when their connection drops out.

Along with the new premium radio service, Pandora has also made a few important changes to its free model. From today, free listeners will be allowed to skip and replay more songs by opting into video advertisements. So rather than paying cash, you can spend a little of your time watching an ad to receive more skip and replay tokens.

Pandora Plus will still cost $4.99 per month, which makes it half the price of competing subscriptions from Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer. The new service will be available on Android and iOS in the coming months, although customers in Australia and New Zealand will have to wait until 2017.