Pandora Unveils Plans for Premium Music Streaming Service

Pandora has unveiled Pandora Premium. That will be a new music streaming service that is composed with parts of Pandora and Rdio, which was acquired in 2015. The service relies mainly on personalized recommendations.

Pandora presented Pandora Premium on Tuesday in New York at an event that included Engadget. The service will use years of information about listening behavior to make recommendations of songs, artists and albums as personal as possible. This should be especially noticeable in the search results, which will be influenced more by user preferences than what’s popular, and the recommendations under New Music, which, incidentally, will consist of albums instead of playlists.

Certain parts of the revamped Pandora app will remain the same, while others, such as Now Playing, will be modified and, for example, show the album cover more prominently. In addition, Pandora switches to playing a related album when the current album or playlist is stopped.

At the end of 2015, Rdio went bankrupt. That was a music streaming service that offered, among other things, the possibility to get more recommendations based on a single piece of music. The company was acquired by Pandora, who expressed their intention to provide a service similar to Rdio a year later. That should now be Pandora Premium. The existing Plus subscription of Pandora will continue to exist, as will the free variant. Pandora Premium should be available sometime in the first quarter of 2017, but how much it will cost is not yet known.