INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Earlier this year, Pandora announced its plans to challenge Spotify by taking aim at one of its rival top features: personalized playlists
Pandora in March began rolling out dozens of variations of personalized playlists, including those spanning moods, activities, and genres &
all powered by its music database, the Music Genome
Today, Pandora says the rollout has completed and all its Premium users will now have access to these new playlists.
The feature is meant to
offer Pandora free users a reason to upgrade to its top-tier paid offering, Pandora Premium
This $9.99 per month service offers on-demand listening, playlist creation, downloads for offline listening, unlimited skips and replays,
higher-quality audio and no advertisements.
Premium users can share their personalized playlists with friends, even if they&re on the free
tier, by sending a link.
The free user cantemporarily access Premium by watching a video adas a way to test drive the Premium experience,
and listen to their friend playlist
This option, called &Access,& launched in December and has been used by millions.
The company declined to comment on how well this &test
drive& strategy has been working to convert free users to paid, saying that it not sharing metrics and engagement numbers around
personalized playlists as the feature hadn&t yet been broadly rolled out
(Only a &select& number had access to the playlists ahead of today).
The playlists themselves are created by a combination of data from
Pandora Music Genome and machine learning models that understand what sort of music you like
But Pandora also employs human curators to perfect the lists and update them, as needed.
At launch, the service was capable of offering
over 60 personalized playlists, like those for &focus,& &energy,& &rainy days& or genre-based ones, like &pop& or &hip hop.& But users won&t
necessarily get all 60 & they&ll only get those that Pandora thinks makes sense for the individual based on the user listening
habits.
Pandora says that, during this staged rollout phase, it was creating up to four new playlists for each user per week, and this
process would continue until it &maxed out& each user playlist categories
This &max& is not a flat number, but varies by user
For example, someone who listens to a lot of different types of music may continue getting new playlists for weeks.
Now that the feature is
live, Pandora plans to release more categories, including new soundtrack themes, in the months ahead.
&This is the beginning of a whole
suite of themed playlists that we will automatically build and tailor to each Premium user
In the coming months, we&ll be rolling out more even more themes for you to unlock,& writesChris Phillips, Pandora CPO, in a blog post
announcing the news.
To find the new playlists, visit the &Featured Playlists& section of &Browse& in the Pandora mobile app.
