Music discovery has always been at the heart of the Pandora experience and today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of personalized station recommendations on both iOS and Android mobile devices.
Pandora had 76.2 million people listening to 1.58 billion hours of music just last month alone. When you layer on the more than 35 billion pieces of thumb feedback we have received since launching in 2005, it equates to billions of data points right at our fingertips. These valuable insights into our listeners’ tastes provide us with a deep understanding of what people love about music and enables us to power the best personalized radio experience for each individual listener.
Up until now, we have primarily been focused on making behind-the-scenes improvements to the playlist experience and we’re excited about the opportunity to apply our same methodology to this brand new Pandora feature.
Here’s how it works:
Personalized station recommendations on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets will provide listeners with up to 6 suggested artist stations to add and listen to at a time, based on current listening preferences, taking into account your station list and what you have told us you like or dislike through thumb interactions. Station recommendations can be found in a couple of areas in the Pandora app:
- Create a Station screen: when you tap to create a station, your recommendations will be listed on the screen. You can create a new station by tapping that station name or choose to expand “More Recommendations” to view more.
- Bottom of Station List: If you scroll down your station list, you will see recommendations at the bottom. You can create a new station by tapping that station name or choose to expand “More Recommendations” to view more.
Your station recommendation list is refreshed when a new station is created or deleted. We will be rolling out this new feature with personalized artist station recommendations and have future plans to evolve and refine the recommendations feature already under development. The more you engage with the product, the more Pandora will learn about your musical preferences and tastes and be able to further optimize the station recommendations for the best personalized listening experience.
As always, we’d love to hear what you think of this new product feature. We’ve said this before, but we’re really just getting started. As we work to fulfill our mission to completely reinvent radio, we are constantly thinking of new ways to seamlessly deliver the best personalized radio experience in every possible listening environment. So stay tuned for even more product enhancements and updates on all of our platforms throughout 2014.
Happy discovering!