Pandora launches Spotify Radar with new playlist, The Drop – TechCrunch



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Pandora Spotify takes with the launch of a new personalized playlist, The Drop, announced this morning. Similar to Spotify's Release Radar, The Drop will also focus on new versions of the artists that interest its listeners. New tracks are added to the playlist the day of their release, says the company, which means Friday, just like Release Radar.

Pandora's playlist will also be longer than Spotify's 30-track Release Radar release because it does not immediately drop old tracks when new tracks arrive. Instead, The Drop will display 100 of the latest tracks listed in order, with the most recent in mind.

The selections on your version of The Drop will be based on your pre-listening behavior on Pandora, the company says. And they will be programmed algorithmically and not organized by hand.

By listening, if you find something you like, you can add it to "My Music" or share it directly with your friends and family.

The launch comes at a time when the company has been more recently focused on personalized playlists in order to offer free users at its paid levels.

In May, the streaming service broadcast dozens of personalized playlists to its Premium subscribers, based on their listening behavior and their musical genome. These "soundtracks," as Pandora calls them, are categorized by genre (R & B, Hip Hop, Pop, Alternative, etc.) as well as by mood or activity (Focus, Chill, Happy, Rainy Day, etc.).

Since their debut, more than 790,000 users have listened to at least one of these custom soundtracks, TechCrunch told Pandora. In addition, users have been listening together for nearly a million hours and have played 21.4 million songs from their soundtracks.

Energy is the best soundtrack with 2.8 million spins, followed by Hip Hop (2.5m), Country (1.8m), R & B (1.43m), Party (1m). , 41 m), Pop (1.4 m) and Happy (1.2 m).

Like these playlists, The Drop will also be available only to Premium subscribers or those who test Pandora during a free trial period before entering into a subscription.

The Premium level is Pandora's answer to Spotify's on-demand service, which offers playlists, downloads for offline listening, unlimited hop and replays, superior audio quality, and no ads.

The seduction strategy of paying customers with customization features can work.

In July, the streaming service reported that its two-third-party payers – Plus and Premium – had reached 6 million subscribers, an increase of 23% over last year. But its user base is down slightly, following the rise of Spotify and Apple Music. Its 71.4 million active users accounted for a 6% drop from the 76 million registered users a year ago.

Although I was able to test the pre-launch of The Drop, it is more difficult to speak specifically about its quality because my child uses my Pandora account more often than me. My reading list was therefore an eclectic mix of David Bowie, Blood on the Dance Floor, Interpol, Ariana Grande, Twenty One Pilots, Echo & The Bunnymen, among others. That said, there was nothing about it that was way off the base for at least one of us.

This was also not 100 songs at launch – only 14 – as the playlist will increase over time.

The Drop is launching today, but will be rolled out based on Pandora Premium users over the next two weeks, Pandora said.

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