Wednesday, January 19, 2011

How to get rid of Pandora's raunchy advertisements

I love listening to music on Pandora's free internet radio. Unfortunately, Pandora has also been playing raunchy ads for me lately. I did some searching and found that there are ways you can affect this. Pandora's ads are targeted, so the registration data you provide has an effect on what ads you see and hear.

Suggestions if you don't like the ads you see:

  1. Change your age in the account settings: Click the 'account' link in the upper right corner of the Pandora home page. Then put in a year that makes you appear to be under 18 or over 60. Under 18 will get rid of all ads for liquor, and other adult products as well as the more risqué fashion and fragrance ads. Over 60 won't lose the liquor ads but most everything else will be pretty sedate.

  2. While you're there under your "account settings" page you can also enable the Explicit Content Filter

  3. You can also upgrade to Pandora One at a very modest $36/year to cut out the advertising altogether. You can find the 'upgrade' option in the upper right hand corner of the main page. You can find out more about Pandora One here
I've just changed the settings on my Pandora account today. We'll see how well it works.