Since the beginning of Pandora Media as a streaming music service in 2000 (originally known as Savage Beast Technologies), the Pandora logo has undergone a few changes.

Each incarnation of the logo is simply the text “Pandora” spelled out as a word mark, but the fonts and colors have been updated with the times.
We will review a brief history of Pandora Media, the company’s logo changes, and the reasons for and complications surrounding the current installment of the Pandora logo.
What Is the Pandora Logo?
Pandora (also known as Pandora Media or Pandora Internet Radio) is a service that streams automated music recommendations. It is available only in the United States via the mobile app or on a web browser, and it is powered by the Music Genome Project.

A user can choose a specific artist/genre, and the service will play similar songs. The user can then provide positive or negative feedback, and that feedback allows the service to improve future song choices based on the user’s preferences. Pandora is available either for free or as a paid service. The free version allows for basic use of Pandora’s features but with certain limitations, and the listener must endure advertisements.
Pandora Plus is the name of the paid service, and it grants the user commercial-free listening, improved streaming quality, subscription channels that are available offline, and music downloads. Pandora’s major competitors are brands like Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music.
Previous Pandora Logos
The New Pandora Logo
Why Did Pandora Change Logos?
Pandora toted their new branding identity as a celebration toward vast improvements in their service when Pandora Plus was rolled out in 2017. With the new subscription service, which offers an advertising-free listening experience with unlimited skips and the ability to listen to music offline, the company felt that a new Pandora logo helped showcase the new image of the brand.

The new Pandora logo was revealed less than 12 months after the brand’s competitor, Spotify, revealed its own redesign in 2015. It is common for competing companies to follow suit with each other when it comes to trends in innovation, technology, and even logo design. It is theorized that the Spotify re-branding was also a contributing factor in the development of the new Pandora logo.
With regard to the “P” monogram, Pandora stated that the P was a versatile canvas in which a variety of visual energy, sound, color, and emotion could be expressed. The “P” is supposed to hold the capability of representing any type of music in diverse ways so that anyone can identify with it. Some say this notion expresses the desperation Pandora might be feeling in order to gain some traction against their biggest competitors.
How Has Pandora Changed Over Time?
Even though the Pandora logo has been redesigned a few times, the essential concept of the brand has remained basically unchanged. Pandora still provides a streaming music service that caters to an individual listener’s specific tastes, and it works as a platform that allows people to easily discover new music they might enjoy based on previous listening preferences.

The major changes with the brand were the name change from Savage Beast Technologies to Pandora, their decision to become a publicly traded company in 2011, their addition of the subscription-based service in 2017, and, of course, the visual changes to their logo and branding.
In 2018, Sirius XM Holdings revealed its plans to acquire Pandora for $3.5 billion. One might predict that when this transaction is complete, there will be further changes to the Pandora business model, and perhaps even another redesign of the Pandora logo.
Conclusion
In summary, Pandora has continued to be a popular streaming music service for online and mobile users over the years. With huge competitors like Apple Music and Spotify emerging and continuously upping their game, Pandora has battled a little to keep up with the times.

In an effort to draw more listeners away from other popular streaming services, they have offered a premium subscription service with many of the same features as the competition, and they have updated their brand presence with the introduction of a new logo. While the new logo may not be all that dynamic or innovative, it does offer consumers a visual change to the brand’s identity that corresponds to improvements in the brand’s service.
The logo is clean and easily read. It is neither a dramatic improvement over the older Pandora logo versions nor a turn in the wrong direction. It performs its basic functions, and we may see further changes once the acquisition by Sirius XM is completed.
Featured photo via Wikimedia Commons
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