Pandora Radio Celebrates 10 Years: Ad-Free Day for 80 Million Active Users Next Week
Pandora is turning 10 years old next week. To celebrate, the streaming service will go ad-free for 24 hours on Sept. 9 for all users.
Sept. 9 is Pandora's 10th anniversary of going public, CNet reports. The popular streaming service plays songs based on users' tastes in music. Custom radio stations can be created by searching for songs, artists or genres. After the station is created, users can further customize their stations by giving songs thumbs up or thumbs down ratings.
Ten years ago, Apple was just introducing the iPod Nano and there was no iPhone yet.
Pandora's 10 year anniversary is coming during some changing times for streaming music. Pandora plays most of its music to U.S. listeners and has created the largest streaming music audience on the Internet. Music listeners now have more choices than Pandora though, like Spotify and Apple Music. Some streaming music services offer more choices on what users can listen to than Pandora.
Spotify, which offers a large variety of music and on-demand songs, just announced that it has more than 75 million active users. That's very close to Pandora's 80 million active users.
Next Wednesday, Pandora will stop playing advertisements for 24 hours, from midnight to midnight. Normally, during listening sessions users will hear various advertisements every so often in between songs. On the anniversary, these ads will be eliminated, and the only interruptions users may encounter are a thank you message from company founder Tim Westergren and the daily skip limit. Users will also see images noting that the ad-free day is sponsored by Pandora One, the $5 subscription service with no ads and more skips.
The free version of Pandora has a daily skip limit that will stop users who try to advance to another song too many times in one day. Spotify also has a skip limit, which is five songs per hour. Upgrading to either Pandora One or Spotify Premium will allow for more skips.
The ad-free day will be called Listener Love Day, according to AP.
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of latinpost.com