Pandora Unveils Premium And It’s All About You
At a press event earlier this week in New York City, Pandora unveiled its paid Spotify competitor. Schedule to launch early next year, Pandora Premium is centered around the not terribly revolutionary idea of auto-magically delivering the music that users actually want to hear.
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Pandora has finally unveiled Pandora Premium, their long-rumored subscription-based streaming music service, designed to compete with rivals such as Spotify and Apple Music.
Like its competitors, Pandora Premium will offer on-demand streaming, giving its users ad-free access to millions of songs in their library for about $10 dollars, which seems to be the magic price point for streaming.
Pandora claims that the service will offer 'smart' playlists, which allow users to automatically add similar songs to a playlist at the tap of a button and which tailor themselves to a user's preference with the use of thumbs up and down buttons and radio stations that are already featured on Pandora.
Tour Dates & Targeted Commuications With Fans
The service will also feature targeted artist communication to fans, letting them know about relevant topics such as new music, or tour dates in the user's region. Premium will also include a playlist featuring every song you’ve ever thumbed up, which may be ferociously long if you were an early adopter for the service when it debuted in 2004.
Pandora's key challenge will be finding a way to differentiate itself sufficiently from its competitors to make them throw over their current streaming service. The company was an early player in streaming music, but its format, allowing users to listen to music that was similar to a song, genre or artist they were interested in but not to that exact artist or song, allowed them to avoid some of the early licensing headwinds that other streaming services have face, but it also made the product a hard sell in the on-demand music world. Now that they've shifted to meet the market, only time will tell if it was too little, too late.
The company expects that Pandora Premium will begin rolling out to users early next year.
via Celebrity Access
