Pandora adding personalized station recommendations to its mobile apps

pandora

With competition from services like Spotify and Apple’s iTunes Radio increasing, and the Beats Music launch on the horizon, Pandora announced this week that it’s rolling out a new feature to its mobile apps to help you discover music.

That feature is called ‘Personalized Station Recommendations,’ and it provides listeners with up to 6 suggested artist stations to listen to at a time. These suggestions are based on your listening habits and like/dislike thumb interactions…

From Pandora’s announcement:

“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. 

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.”

Users will find the new feature in one of two places. The first is in the ‘Create a Station’ screen, where you’ll see the option to view ‘More Recommendations.’ And the second is at the bottom of the Station List, where you’ll see a similar option.

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Pandora also announced that as of December, it had 76.2 million active listeners and 1.58 billion listening hours logged across all platforms, and that it accounted for 8.6% of total US radio listening. Not too shabby given the growing competition.

The new Personalized Station Recommendations feature will be rolling out to Pandora’s Android and iOS apps over the “next few days.” We’re not seeing the app update as of this writing, but you can find the latest version in the App Store for free.