If you’re a heavy Pandora user, subscribing to Pandora One is a no-brainer: For only $4.99 per month, you get higher-quality audio streams and no ads. But if all you want is an ad-free day of music for that dinner party or get-together, Pandora may soon have an option for you: GigaOm reports, Pandora plans to introduce a “day pass,” which would allow you to pay a small fee for a day of ad-free listening.
Pandora executive Chris Phillips told attendees at an investor event held Thursday that the current plan is to offer 24 hours of ad-free music for 99 cents, but stated that Pandora the pricing and duration isn’t set and stone. According to GigaOm, the company is exploring “whether the day pass should be for one or three days.”
A Pandora representative tells GigaOm that the company expects to launch the day pass service sometime this year. There’s no word on whether day pass users would gain access to higher quality streaming like Pandora One users , however.
Why this matters: In the competitive online radio market, differentiation is key, and the added flexibility of Pandora’s day passes may be enough to convince listeners to choose Pandora over competing services. It also makes for an easy upsell: You can pay a dollar for a day’s worth of ad-free music, or pay $5 for an entire month. For music lovers, that extra few dollars may be worth it.