Pandora’s subscription service in testing, “redefines what premium could and should be”

Pandora Premium event image 001

After recently refreshing its brand identity, the popular Internet radio service Pandora today officially announced its upcoming on-demand music service, simply called Premium, which the company says is going to redefine what “premium” could and should be.

Pandora Premium, “an effortless and flexible experience for all subscribers,” includes features that tune into each listener’s individuality while leveraging its deep knowledge of musical data.

Rising from the ashes of Rdio, which Pandora bought last year, Premium was shown to a small group of VIPs and reporters at last night’s lavish event in New York City. The user interface closely resembles that of Rdio.

The new service, reportedly priced at $9.99 per month, is the company’s way of overcoming a listenership plateau that it’s been facing for some time now, especially following the advent of Apple Music more than a year ago.

Take a closer look at Premium in Pandora’s sneak peek video below.

According to Pandora CEO Tim Westergren, “premium means personal”.

The service provides on-demand access to Pandora’s whole music catalog and personalized recommendations to help listeners find new songs to listen to. In fact, Premium is leveraging a treasure trove of likes that Pandora users have given to songs over the years to show you songs, artists and albums you might be interested in.

“If you start building a playlist, Pandora Premium will suggest songs for you to add and even do it automatically,” Engadget wrote. “And, of course, you can take all of these songs offline.”

From the article:

Every time you thumbs-up a song, it gets added to an automatically generated playlist. And that playlist pulls in every single song to which you’ve ever given a thumbs-up. If you’ve been using Pandora for a long time, that list could get very, very long indeed.

Pandora will let you automatically add songs based on similarities in the Music Genome Project—don’t worry, you’ll be able to remove songs that you’re not interested in.

And rather than use popularity-based search rankings like many other on-demand music services do, Premium personalizes search by user so not everyone will get the same results as they type.

The Browse section has gained a New Music section that’s somewhat similar to Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, but surfaces full albums you might like instead of individual songs. Another new feature, called Autoplay, will start playing more similar music to match the tone of what you just finished.

While the Now Playing screen has been revamped, Pandora’s home screen won’t change: your recently played stations and full collection of stations are in My Music.

Any created playlists and albums that you love live in one combined list.

Pandora will begin rolling out the new service to users in the first quarter of 2017. Timeline or pricing for Pandora Premium had not been disclosed at post time.

Source: Pandora via Engadget