Pandora Announces Own Version Of Spotify's Personalized Playlists

Pandora has announced that it’s launching its own personalized playlists feature to take on Spotify. Pandora will be able to build playlists that will fit with the user’s moods, activities and listening habits.

“Today we’re announcing Pandora’s personalized soundtracks — unique playlists built just for you. We’re testing them now with a small group of Pandora Premium users and look forward to bringing them to all our Premium subscribers soon,” the company said on its blog.

“The personalized playlists fit your moods, activities and favorite genres and are updated each week based on your individual musical tastes. We combined our human curation with personalized algorithms to automatically serve up new artists and songs anticipating the perfect balance of discovery and steady favorites.”

These new playlists will appear in the “Browse” section under “Featured Playlists” on the mobile app. Users will be able to save these playlists in their collection or even share it with their friends.

Pandora is able to create these personalized soundtracks using its Music Genome, a music information database that’s powered by machine learning algorithms. Pandora’s Music Genome is the one that’s responsible for analyzing the user’s music preferences. This is then combined with Pandora’s in-house curation team to build a playlist that reflects the user’s music tastes and moods.

“We’ve been building out, for many years, a collection of well over 75 machine learning algorithms and techniques to help drive content discovery and delivery,” Pandora chief product officer of personalization technology Chris Phillips told TechCrunch. “What we’re doing is what we believe is the bleeding edge of deep learning algorithms.”

Currently, Pandora is able to create more than 60 personalized playlists, but this doesn’t mean users will be able to access all 60 playlists immediately after opening the app. Instead, Pandora will release the playlists based on the user’s recent listening habits. If a user has been listening to a lot of hip-hop for example, the user might see a new personalized playlist based on that genre.

Pandora will also be offering personalized playlists based on moods, like “happy” or “rainy days.” The company also plans on expanding the types of personalized playlist that users may discover while they’re listening. This includes creating playlists based on events or holidays.

Pandora’s personalized playlist won’t only feature tracks that users may have already liked or listened to, but it will also put in tracks that users might not have even listened to before. This will include new releases, hidden gems from the user’s favorite artists and other tracks that Pandora believes the user might like.

This isn’t the first time Pandora has offered algorithm-based playlists on its service. Back in October, the company launched playlists based on genres and themes, which were also curated by the company’s Music Genome, as pointed out by Engadget. With this new endeavor, Pandora appears to be doubling down on personalized playlists and is trying to take on Spotify on its own game.