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April 21, 2010

A More Social Pandora

Dear listeners -

After months of furious development, this morning we're launching a major new initiative on Pandora.

As you may know, we've tried for a while now to figure out how to incorporate the more social aspects of music into our service. Sharing music is, after all, one of life's great pleasures.

The idea behind today's update is to make it really easy to share your Pandora stations and music discoveries with your friends - and vice versa. Now your friends can be a daily source of inspiration for new stations and music discovery. I've been testing out the service while we were developing it and I have to say it really brings a wonderful new human dimension to the listening experience.

To make this truly easy for you, we've partnered with the experts at Facebook. Starting today, you can easily link your experience on Pandora with your friends on Facebook. This quickly brings your Facebook friend list into Pandora along with your Facebook profile picture. It quite literally puts a whole new face on Pandora.

Know that this is entirely optional. Even though we're excited about the new dimension this adds to Pandora, we want to be very respectful of your privacy. If you don't want to bring your Facebook world into Pandora, just opt out. It will disappear forever. Period.

As always, and maybe on this one more than ever, we're eager to hear what you think.

Enjoy!

Tim (Founder)

P.S. For more detail, feel free to check out: blog.pandora.com/faq/contents/10010.html

Posted by Deb at 11:14 AM

April 12, 2010

Pandora Background Listening for iPhone OS 4

Back in the summer of 2008, Pandora had over 10 million listeners on the web and we were growing at a pretty good clip. Then in July we released Pandora for iPhone and everything changed. Suddenly, people could take Pandora with them: into the gym, the car, the living room, the kitchen, outside while jogging... the list goes on. Pandora truly became an anytime, anywhere phenomenon and as a result the use of Pandora accelerated dramatically. Less than two years later, we have over 50 million listeners and mobile listening accounts for more than 40% of the hours we stream.

In the years that followed, we brought Pandora to more and more environments with the goal of being everywhere our listeners wanted us to be: on Blackberries and Androids, Blu-Rays and TVs.

However, there was still one thing missing for our iPhone users: background listening. That's all about to change.

Some weeks ago Apple invited us to a secret meeting where they revealed that background applications were coming to the iPhone OS 4 and that they'd like to use Pandora to show off these new capabilities at their big iPhone OS 4 product unveiling. Under the new operating system, Pandora will stream in the background while you use your iPhone to browse the web, read an e-book or play a game.

Participating in Apple's launch event meant sending an engineer to Apple to update our software for OS 4 (this took about a day) and many, many, many (many) hours of presentation preparation so that we'd be ready to share the stage with Steve Jobs. This of course was all done with the utmost secrecy. Just a tiny handful of people even inside Pandora knew what we were doing.

Getting to participate in one of these Apple events has been a kind of lifelong dream for me. The Apple folks are masters of these types of presentations and it was an incredible experience to get to experience it from the inside. As our Founder Tim and I stood on stage presenting, there was a moment about halfway through where my nerves calmed enough (The software was going to work! It was going to be ok!) that I could just enjoy the moment and just take it all in. I don't think I'll ever forget it.

Apple released the iPhone OS 4 Developer Preview this week so that engineers can start updating their applications in anticipation of the launch of the new OS sometime this summer. We're incredibly excited to enable background listening on the iPhone (and ultimately on the iPad too) -- we'll be ready just as soon as Apple ships the new OS.

-Tom

Posted by Tom Conrad at 5:23 PM

April 2, 2010

Pandora on iPad

Tomorrow morning as the first iPads are delivered, we'll be launching an entirely new Pandora application built from the ground up for the iPad.

Pandora on iPad has been completely re-imagined for the iPad's big touch interface. I think of it as the ultimate lean-in Pandora experience. Just tap the Pandora icon and let the music play while you read about the bands and music you discover. Pass it back and forth with a friend and share your discoveries. My hope is that it can play the same role that the album cover did when I was a kid -- something concrete to enjoy and share as the music plays. There's something magical about that, and this really is a magical device.

For me, this is the culmination of an almost 20 year wait. Some kids go to college so they can become a doctor. Some go with the dream of success in business. Some go in pursuit of knowledge. Some go just to have a good time.

I went so I could work at Apple.

That's not a joke, or an exaggeration. I literally went with that singular goal and by some stroke of incredible luck, I managed to land a job there upon my graduation 18 years ago. Working at Apple was an amazing experience; the company is full of incredible people driven by a desire to change the world. During my four years there I saw all sorts of incredible products: some commonplace (the PowerBook), some infamous (the Newton) and some that never saw the light of day. Chief among those that were never released were all manner of "tablet" Macintoshes. Powered by pens and touch, these fabled devices where designed to set the Mac free from the confines of the keyboard. In the end though, it wasn't meant to be. We could never settle on the right combination of hardware, software, and economics that would make the machines practical and popular.

None the less, there was something incredible about even those early experiments, and I've waited almost 20 years for some variety of tablet from Apple that would finally resolve all the issues and get the formula right. So it's with great anticipation that I look forward to the launch of the iPad tomorrow.

I'll be in line at an Apple Store with everyone else to pick mine up. If you decide to do the same, I hope you'll give Pandora on iPad a listen and let us know what you think. We'd love the feedback.

Posted by Tom Conrad at 6:10 AM

April 1, 2010

50,000,000!

We celebrated a big milestone for the company last week. Sometime late Thursday evening our 50 millionth listener registered for Pandora!

Amazing to us how this has all happened by word of mouth.

The growth of mobile has clearly helped a ton. An ever-increasing number of folks are coming to Pandora for the first time on a smartphone or a blue-ray player, or a connected home audio device. Lots more evening and weekend usage. The vision for Pandora anytime, anywhere is really starting to take shape...

Thanks again for listening, and for spreading the word! Next stop 100,000,000!

Tim (Founder)

Posted by Deb at 3:00 PM