Ameena
In the midst of various subscription services like Beats and Spotify launching new features, Pandora decided to shake things up by announcing that it would launch personalized music recommendations in its mobile app. This new feature recommends new bands based on your most recent listening preferences, and listeners will be able to add up to six artist station recommendations at one time to their personal lists.
Pandora is the Internet’s top radio service and boasts up to 76.2 million active daily listeners. The point of this new feature is to increase the amount of time these listeners spend listening to the service. The more time listeners spend listening to music, the more time they would encounter and listen to ads (Pandora depends on their free, ad-supported service as its primary source of profit), and, as a result, the more money the company would reel in (in addition to various other contributing factors).
As mentioned, Pandora faces a lot of competition from other music service providers. Apple added iTunes Radio last year, Google came up with its All Access feature and is going to be releasing another subscription service through YouTube within the next year, and Beats is releasing its subscription-only service at the end of this month. Pandora, however, seems confident that its vast listenership will just rise more even with the ever increasing competition.
