Pandora Celebrates 10 Years with Ad-Free Listening

If you listen to free Pandora but have wondered what the ad-free Pandora One subscription version is like, today is the day to find out what you get for $4.99 a month.

To commemorate its 10-year anniversary, Pandora has declared September 9 Listener Love Day and is streaming with no ad interruptions until midnight.

With almost 80 million listeners tuning in each month, Pandora says users have logged 74 billion hours listening to more than 200,000 artists, created about 8 billion personalized stations, and shared 55 billion thumbs (up/down) over the past decade. The service has also put together a “10x10 mixtape” of the most thumbed-up songs on Pandora from the past 10 years.

“The music landscape has evolved significantly since the company was founded in 2005,” the company said in a statement. “We have seen the rise of EDM [electronic dance music], hip hop’s mass market acceptance, alternative feeding top 40 hits, and Taylor Swift’s move from country to pop.

“Our team of 95 musicologists (made up of curators, analysts, playlist engineers and scientists) has come a long way since the original formation of Pandora’s Music Genome Project. The first song, Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” was analyzed with pen and paper, before the attributes (close to 200 at the time) were entered into an Excel grid. Today, what started as one song has led to the team listening to and analyzing more than 57 years of music and cataloging 375 million individual traits, from hand claps to twang and techno robotic.”

Pandora also announced that starting Thursday, September 10 it will offer a Pandora One Day Pass for 99 cents. Available for purchase on iOS and Android devices, the pass lets listeners sample ad-free Pandora One streaming for 24 hours.

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