How to Use Pandora – Free Music Streaming App

Hey everyone, in today’s video, I want to show you how to use Pandora.

It’s a music streaming and podcast app.

And it’s been around for a long time, since 2005.

I’ve had it for about a decade or so.

So if you’re a beginner and you haven’t used Pandora, it’s been a while since you used Pandora.

They do change it up all the time.

And if you use other apps like Apple Music or Spotify, this might be a good alternative for you.

So I’ll show you how to use it.

So let’s jump into the App Store, get Pandora, and I’ll show you exactly how to use the app and all the features it has to offer.

So if you jump into the Apple store, or the Google Play store here, you’ll find Pandora music and podcasts if you search for them, and go ahead and download and open them and let me show you around the app.

Now I’ve had the app for well over 10 years.

It actually came out in 2005.

But let me briefly show you the structure of the app, then I’ll show you the most useful feature that you’ll use every time you use the app.

So for you, if you come to the homepage here, you’ll have a bunch of options here to choose from.

So you could browse music right over here, by genre, new music podcasts, you’ll have your recently played here, you’ll have the top songs of the week.

So you could go through this homepage and it gives you a lot of useful options.

But what I think is a lot easier is the search option.

So look at the bottom.

You have my collection, search and profile.

So let’s jump into search here and on their search, just on the top search bar, press that and search for anything, any artist you want, any type of music you want.

And as you can see here, underneath that you have categories.

You can search by artist, you can search by song stations, and even podcasts if you want to check out podcasts, but underneath that it will show you all of those things.

So if I want to follow Billy Eilish here, for example, I could click her name here.

So you can see how many listeners she has.

So 6 million in the case of this artist, and then right underneath that you should see Billy Eilish’s radio station.

If I click this, it’s going to take me to a radio station.

I noticed some artists actually require you to watch an ad before you can even play the free version here.

But if I press play here, it says buffering and the song is playing.

So you see this little banner at the bottom.

If I press this, it’ll come to her station right here.

And it’ll play different songs for you.

Again, it’s like a radio station based on these artists.

So there may be songs that are not specifically this artist’s songs, but they’re part of this radio station.

And while you’re on the page of music, you can always press pause, you can always skip a song.

But with the free version, if you press skip a song to move to the next song, if I press A right here, you move to the next song.

The problem is, you won’t get many of those skips for free.

And that’s what the premium version is.

So you have unlimited skips.

I’ll show you that in a little bit.

And the other thing you could do here is you could do replays.

That’s next to the play option.

And again, you’ll have limited replays and you have thumbs down or thumbs up.

That’s a way to train the app to show you what you like.

So if you press thumbs up, it’s going to show you more music like this in the future.

But one of the most useful options here is this plus icon on the left side.

If I press this, it will add it to my collection.

So now I’m going to press this down arrow on the top left to collapse.

And now I can get my menu back on the bottom and I have my own collection next to search for.

So we looked at you.

We looked at search and let’s go to my collection.

And under my collection, you get all the different things that you added to this collection manually by pressing plus, so you can easily come back to my collection to press play on different radio stations.

So if I want to pause this one here, I can and then start Christmas radio.

I could just press play there, or 80s pop.

I could press play there.

So each one of these I found under search.

So if I go back to search in this case, and look for Christmas, you can see Christmas radio shows up here if I press it, and then on this page, I could press the more option, the three dots here, and I could go ahead and add it to my collection.

Here you can see the checkmark that has been added to my collection.

And if you press play, and then you come to an individual song, you see that banner right on top of your menu.

Press that banner, and it’ll expand that song.

You can also add these by pressing the plus sign next to them.

So here I could press the plus sign next to this one and add it to my collection.

If I like it, I press thumbs up to train Pandora to show me more music like this.

And I could press the down arrow here now because it’s playing in the background.

So most of your use of the app is going to be between the search option and the collection option.

You’ll kind of go back and forth and play different radio stations.

As far as replays and skips, if you want to have those be unlimited, go to your profile tab.

That’s the option we haven’t looked at yet in the corner, and let me show you a few things here.

The first thing is to upgrade.

You see that on the top left here, if you press upgrade, these are the options that Pandora gives you for Pandora premium.

There are two of them.

There’s a Pandora premium that’s 1299 a month at the time of this recording, but there is a free month.

Your unlimited pretty much everything, even offline listening, so you don’t have to be connected online.

And you get this other option, which is Pandora plus, where you get unlimited skips and some offline listening.

But you can make and share playlists like you can with the premium model.

So you could explore that under upgrade right there.

And then the other useful option here is you see the section right underneath your username, it says followers following thumbs up playlist.

Thumbs up is just a thumbs up that I just showed you how to give to the different songs to kind of train the app for you and the playlist that you could actually make on this app, which in this case, came from my thumbs up playlist.

And then you have followers and following.

Now, if you press any of these, you can actually find friends using their email or connect to Facebook and use this more as a social media platform just like Facebook.

And it makes it a lot easier to share songs and see what other people are up to.

So if you wanted to use it that way, this is where you would find that option right here on your profile.

So let me go back to searching here.

And let me just click another radio station here.

You could press plus to collect this and add it to my collection.

You have the share option here next to it, where you could share it on different platforms, or even copy the link here.

For example, if you want to use it or press more options, just text it to someone else or share it within the app.

And if you press more, you see that download option for offline viewing.

If you upgrade to Pandora premium, you can basically download the song to your phone and play it that way.

Again, you have the share option here.

And you have to add it to the queue for basically playing it at a later time if you didn’t want to play it and just wanted to queue it up for later.

And that’s basically an overview of how to use Pandora’s free streaming service for music and podcasts.

I hope you found this useful.

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I’ll catch you next time.

Thanks for watching.