Pandora’s new Premium service touts their personalised playlists to compete with Spotify at $10 per month.
The popular internet radio service provider just announced their own on-demand music service. Dubbed the Pandora Premium, the service offers personalised playlists and will cost you $10/month to subscribe.
So how exactly do they differ from the current crowd favourites Spotify or Apple Music?
All three offer streaming music services for roughly the same price. They allow you to create playlists or create custom radio stations based on your favourites. Songs or playlists can also be saved for offline listening.
What makes Pandora standout from the two is how they customise the music through their Music Genome Project. While Spotify learns your taste the more you use it and Apple Music makes you choose the music you like when you first use it, Pandora does it quite technically.
The Music Genome Project uses over 450 “genes” that describe different elements that make up a song. This can include the gender of the singer to the kind of instrument used. This data, together will their algorithms, automatic prediction methods and human curation, will help generate custom your playlists.
For example, if you have been listening to fast beat songs like dance and rock, Pandora will create a playlist called “Your Party Soundtrack” and so on. This will be updated every week with songs you listened as well as Pandora’s suggestions.
This service is still early on and there will probably be some hiccups. What’s good is that there are more and more players coming into the music streaming industry. Hopefully this will help drive companies lessen their subscription fees and make their services even better.
