Pandora has completed its transformation. A little more than a year ago, he bought Rdio, one of the best-known music streaming services, after he filed for bankruptcy. And this morning, after months of rumors has officially launched the streaming service on demand with which will try to compete with Spotify, Apple Music and company.
The service is called Pandora Premium, and like all other alternatives will require a subscription of $ 10 a month, which surely in Europe end up becoming 10 euros. In exchange for that fee will offer users an extensive library with millions of songs available, streaming without ads and the ability to save your favorite music to listen offline.
The application will have a simple, clean and intuitive design very similar to Rdio. The color of the app will change depending on the cover of the disc you are listening to, and will keep the army of radio stations with which Pandora has always stood out. In addition, to keep track of the music you like, you will add all the songs you like to a playlist of favorites.
It will also have its recommendations system, which has been designed thanks to its base of 78 million users. And a feature called AutoPlay that will allow you to continue listening to your favorite music by creating a radio station based on the album or playlist you just listened to.
Your great weapon is personalization
The weapon that Pandora wants to differentiate from Spotify is personalization. Your smart playlists will allow you to automatically add similar songs to a playlist at the touch of a button. It will also offer personalized searches that will give different results to different users depending on your musical history, and the navigation section will be adapted to your musical tastes.
Despite being presented this morning, the new Pandora Premium service will not start arriving until early next year. It will be then when Pandora completes the circle looking for a new way of remuneration besides the sale of tickets and their online radios, which have also been boosted with the launch of Plus in September.
So, now only remains to see how many of the 78 million users with whom Pandora has decided to take the plunge and start paying for a service that tries to live up to Spotify and Apple Music. The personalization of the experience is an important point (nobody likes to be proposed by Reggaeton when he is a lover of Rock and vice versa), but will it be enough? In a few months we will have the answer in the form of data.