Never does the Pandora app feel cluttered, but as it adds podcasts and on-demand listening into the mix, radio listening might eventually get crowded. There’s also a dedicated button to replay a song and full screen display with the ability to share a song and start a new station.īecause the primary focus of Pandora is to play radio-like stations, the app remains easy to navigate. Those include a sleep timer and alarm clock. Scattered throughout are lots of nice touches that make sense for a music app. Once you’re playing a song you can swipe up to display bio information about the artist along with the elements of the particular song: instruments used, types of rhythms, and more. The Pandora app displays plenty of information about tracks without being too cluttered. Otherwise you’ll need to start a station from the song. Pandora’s radio functionality resides in its main app so when you search for an artist or song so you’ll see the song you search for-you just can’t listen to it unless you subscribe to the Premium service. You can also shuffle stations if you really want to add some variety to you life. Every time you start a new station it will be saved until you delete it. You can search for an artist, song, mood, or decade to start a station or choose one of the premade stations to get started. Pandora’s roots are all about radio functionality and so it’s definitely the service to beat. If you’d like to match Spotify’s on-demand listening function, beyond just radio, Pandora Premium can do that as well, which also costs the industry standard $9.99 per month. Not only will you get a music-only listening experience, but you’ll be able to skip more songs if you don’t get a song you want to hear. If you’d like to ditch the ads it will cost you $4.99 to go to Pandora Plus. Pandora took off because of its decent music recommendations, but also because it is free with ads-just like traditional radio-and remains that way to this day. Its music genome project helped identify similar artists and songs so well, it became popular among the general public, young and old, looking for an endless supply of music. Pandora wasn’t the first to do streaming internet radio, but it was the first to usher in an era of good streaming radio. Overall, Spotify Stations is fast to get started, easy to use, and probably exactly what most people are looking for when they decide the time-of-day calls for music to be playing. To that end, it would be nice to see a history of the past songs you listened to in Stations so you can save the ones you might have missed. It would be neat if all the saved songs became its own playlist within Spotify as well, like “Favorites from Stations.” Combining the “save” feature with the thumbs up, traditionally meaning “play more like this,” is a little too minimalistic. The first and most obvious is a way to save a song to your library without it necessarily influencing future music. Stations shouldn’t be criticized for being overly simplistic, but it could use a few minor feature additions. If you look at it this way, Stations is just a lightweight interface which should enable you to hit play and forget about the rest of the choices associated with picking out music. Stations allows the company to offload the radio functionality without being confusing. The Spotify app already has this radio functionality, but its desktop and mobile devices are verging very close on becoming iTunes-the butt of every joke for including too much stuff and being too complex. If you aren’t intrigued by unlimited, on-demand music enough to subscribe to Spotify in the first place, maybe you’re looking for something more like a radio station, in an easy too use package. That’s why it might be the perfect way to listen to music-and as simple as turning on the radio. Stations is a fast way to get music playing and show off the company’s world-class algorithm recommendations. There aren’t many more features than those yet. If you like or hate a song you can give it a thumbs up or down to influence future music, but that’s pretty much it. You can also rename stations, have stations play only a single artist or mix in a few you like, and limit it to all similar music or just those artists. (A feature particularly useful because it’s easy to accidentally switch stations.) Once you have multiple stations, you can slide up and down to switch to the different stations, and as a nice detail, stations pause and resume as you go back to them. Or, search for a song, decade, or something else. To get started, add a “station” by tapping in the top left corner and select an artist or a mood. If you do pay for a premium account you won’t hear ads and can skip as many songs as you want. The app is free and will play ads if you don’t pay for Spotify Premium. To get started, you need to sign up or sign in to an existing Spotify account (a free account works). What is Spotify Stations and how much does it cost?
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