pandora-premium – Tech Today w/ Ken May

It’s been just about a month since Pandora unveiled its attempt at building full-fledged, on-demand streaming music service. Aside from a handful of bugs, the big problem with Pandora Premium was that it was invite only. That’s changing today: Pandora Premium is now available for anyone to try. Like just about every other streaming music service, it’ll run you $9.99 per month and the app is available for Android and iOS (a web version of Pandora’s on-demand service is coming soon). If you didn’t catch the news in March, Pandora Premium has a few notable features that set it apart from the competition. If you put a few songs into a playlist, the app will use Pandora’s Music Genome Project to automatically add sonically similar tunes. If you’ve been using Pandora for a long time, it’ll draw on your listening history and “thumbs-up” songs to build you custom playlists and recommend new releases that are tailored specifically to your music history. And from a design perspective, Pandora is one of the simplest and best-looking streaming music services I’ve tried. There are a number of kinks that need to be worked out, but there’s enough good stuff going on in Pandora Premium that I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how the service improves over time. Pandora’s also putting some cash and big names behind its new service to make sure it doesn’t get lost amidst Spotify, Apple Music and all the rest. The company’s “Sounds Like You” campaign will feature 18 different artists including Big Sean, Gorillaz , Questlove, 2 Chainz, Halsey, Keith Urban, Maggie Rogers, Pitbull, Ziggy Marley and a bunch more. That’s a lot of star power to throw behind its new service — here’s hoping that all the artists involved don’t pull their music from other streaming services. While an ad campaign isn’t generally all that exciting, Pandora did confirm that they’ll be hosting exclusive “mixtapes” from each of the 18 artists involved in the campaign that feature the songs that have inspired them the most over the years. So if you want to know what drove Gorillaz to get as weird as they are, you’ll want to tune in to these mixes. If you’re ready to give Pandora Premium a try, the company is offering either 30 or 60 days for free, depending on where you sign up. Signing up on Pandora’s site will net you the longer free trial and lower monthly price, as the company charges more when you sign up inside the app itself — thank Apple and its 30 percent cut from subscriptions for that. And if you’ve been paying for the $5 Pandora Plus service, you’ll get a whopping six months of Premium at that same price point. Considering how much more you get with Premium, doing that is basically a no-brainer. Pandora hasn’t tweaked anything else over the last month, but we should see the app get some tweaks and improvements in the coming months, as well.

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Pandora’s on-demand streaming service is available to everyone

Despite recent layoffs and the fact that it only launched a streaming service last month , Pandora is a giant player in the internet radio market. Billboard unveiled a partnership with the service for its Hot 100 chart, and says it immediately impacted 35 songs. It pushed nine of those up by five or more spots in the rankings, including Sex With Me from Rihanna and Rob $tone’s Chill Bill , which leaped 10 places. Lady Gaga’s Million Reasons , meanwhile, is now on the Hot 100 thanks to Pandora, Billboard says. Though Pandora recently launched a $10 Premium streaming service based on its Rdio acquisition , it won’t be available to the public until later this year. Still, it has a very consequential 78 million users and 4.3 million subscribers to its $5 Pandora Plus (not-on-demand) radio service. “Pandora is now the number one radio station in 87 US markets and represents roughly 10 percent of all radio listening, ” says Pandora CEO Tim Westergren. That’s why Pandora had such an immediate impact, even services with many more subscribers like Spotify and Apple Music already affect the chart. Pandora data will also be included in Billboard’s streaming and formula-based charts, including country, rock, R&B/Hip-Hop, Rap and Dance/Electronica. Despite the boost, Pandora announced earlier this month that it had laid off 7 percent of its workforce, due to a big increase in competition from Apple Music, Spotify and other services. On top of the $75 million spent on Rdio, it also completely revamped its site late last year and is no doubt spending big to launch Pandora Premium streaming. The company is reportedly looking for a buyer, with Sirius XM rumored to be the leading candidate so far. It may be able to take some hope from Tidal, which just sold a big chunk of itself to Sprint for a reported $200 million. Source: Billboard

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Pandora’s radio data now included in Billboard Hot 100