Raditaz Partners With Echo Nest To Take On Pandora

Internet radio provider Raditaz has partnered with The Echo Nest music intelligence platform to deliver personalized streams that it says are superior to Pandora. By combining The Echo Nest's data with a 14 million song library, Raditaz believes it is building a better music discovery and listening platform that it's competition. 

In the view of some Pandora critics, its Achilles heel is repetition and a lack of diversity within personalized stations. By partnering with The Echo Nest, Raditaz now lets its users enjoy better personalization:

• Users can create stations with up to 5 artists or 5 songs
• Users can adjust artist and song popularity in order to refine their stations to meet their personal preferences
• Users can preview their stations to see which artists and songs will be included, and make tweaks based on personal preference.

Raditaz is launching an updated versions of its iOS app, Android app, and web platform today as well, which all utilize the new Echo Nest integration. Users can customize stations using tags (i.e. “driving,” “working out,”), location information, ratings (“rock on” vs. “thumbs down”), artist or song selections, and popularity.

"The ability to swap out artists and adjust popularity to drive new music discovery flips the Pandora model on its head" said the company in a statement, "putting the personalization in the users’ hands, rather than at the mercy of an algorithm driven by limited data, with access to a small pool of songs."

MORE: Raditaz: Location-Specific User-Created Radio Stations