Spotify Vs Pandora: Which one suits artist needs better?

Pandora music has been around for two decades now, and its algorithm feeds the quality of the relationship between the artist and his audience. It is, without a doubt, one of the most experienced platforms. Spotify, on the other hand, has gained massive popularity in recent years, pushing other platforms to adopt new features to catch up.

To help you discern between these two platforms and choose the best one for you to reach your audience, here are some key elements to keep in mind: 

• Streaming quality
• Pricing
• Available content 
• Music Discovery
• User interface

These alone will give you a brief idea of which platform your fans will feel more comfortable listening to your music.

Why Pandora streaming quality is outstanding

Up until now, Spotify Premium has a maximum bitrate of 320 kbps as opposed to 192 kbps for Pandora Premium. Even though both of them use the same lossy AAC file format, which doesn’t allow HiFi sound quality, Spotify has a slightly better quality. High streaming quality is not a definitive criterion to opt-out a streaming platform, yet you might win the heart of music purists with it.  

Climbing Spotify charts and Discover Weekly

It is clear that Spotify has a higher streaming quality, but not high enough to discern between the two.

What you have to know about pricing 

Do you have a good understanding of who your audience is? Great. Now choosing the right platform based on accessibility can make you gain a great number of fans. 

Access to premium content is the minimum standard to enjoy a comfortable user experience, and to each platform its price structure.   

Here are the price structures for Pandora followed by Spotify: 

* all priced mentioned per month

* all priced mentioned per month

Available content & Music Discovery 

Both platforms have a large choice of artists, projects, and podcasts to listen to, yet it will be very hard for the audience to find inde artists on Pandora. This is due to a complex process of submitting the song and waiting for it to be approved in Pandora, as opposed to accepting everything on Spotify. Independent artists usually go through a third-party distributor, which in turn will submit to platforms but will not go through the selective submission process that is Pandora’s.

Pandora was created as a music discovery service using the Music Genome Project, with its most important feature being Stations. Spotify captured the essence of it and launched playlists like “Discover Weekly” and “Release Radar”. They function the same way, yet Spotify doesn’t allow a lot of customization. 

Both do a great job in curating tailored playlists, but Pandora stations have more functionality. 

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Pandora’s stations are very customizable and have many modes: 

• MyStation mode: A basic mode that generates songs based on the way you fed the algorithm by adding or removing artists from the station.
• Crowd Favs mode: Suggests songs based on the way you fed the algorithm, but also on what the others users liked the most.
• Discovery mode: Generates music based on how you customized the station and prioritizes artists that were rarely listened to but fit in it.
• Deep Cuts mode: Generates the less popular songs of artists you put in the station.
• Newly Released mode: Generates the newest songs from artists in your station. 

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User interface and other goodies

Pandora has a vintage feel to it; when you use it, it rearranges all your stations and playlists like a Jukebox would. Filtering by playlists, stations, artists, albums, or even songs makes Pandora very intuitive when finding what you’re looking for. 

Spotify has a nice feel to it, too, with its dark-themed environment, creating an intimate feeling when you’re on it. The Home and Search features are very intuitive, but many features like creating playlists folders are only available on the desktop app. This puts Pandora at an advantage when it comes to User Interface.