Just over a year after acquiring the scraps of Rdio, Pandora has revealed Premium, its take on an on-demand music streaming service, designed to compete against the likes of Spotify and Apple Music. Just like every other $10-a-month music streaming service, Pandora Premium will offer users an extensive library featuring millions of songs available on-demand, ad-free streaming, and the ability to save your music offline.
Where Premium separates itself from the Spotifys of the world is personalization. Pandora’s smart playlists will allow users to automatically add similar songs to a playlist at the tap of a button. Premium also features personalized search, which will give different users different results based on their listening history. The browse section is tailored to your tastes, including the new release section.
I’ve been a customer of Pandora for quite some time and love it—they have the best algorithmic radio stations in the industry. With Premium, they are combing that with on-demand music just like the other music services offer. This is going to be an interesting battle to watch in 2017.