Pandora Now Recommends New Stations

Pandora announced on Wednesday that it would be adding personalized station recommendations to its app on both iOS and Android platforms. While Pandora is still very much centered around users personalizing their own stations, there will now be suggestions for additional channels when creating a station or browsing through existing ones.

The company says that the new suggestions system will be powered by each Pandora user’s personal history, as well as ratings given for particular songs.

“Pandora had 76.2 million people listening to 1.58 billion hours of music just last month alone. When you layer on the more than 35 billion pieces of thumb feedback we have received since launching in 2005, it equates to billions of data points right at our fingertips,” the company wrote in a Pandora blog post. “These valuable insights into our listeners’ tastes provide us with a deep understanding of what people love about music and enables us to power the best personalized radio experience for each individual listener.”

The company says that recommendations will be offered at the “Create a Station” screen, as well as the “Bottom of Station” list. With the former, users will be offered recommendations when they tap to create a new station. With the latter, recommendations will be offered at the bottom of a user’s station list.

Pandora is hoping to have a big year and the company says that personalized station recommendations are just the first of many new features and enhancements to be unveiled in 2014.

“As always, we’d love to hear what you think of this new product feature. We’ve said this before, but we’re really just getting started. As we work to fulfill our mission to completely reinvent radio, we are constantly thinking of new ways to seamlessly deliver the best personalized radio experience in every possible listening environment. So stay tuned for even more product enhancements and updates on all of our platforms throughout 2014.”