Pandora announced today that it is making its new site available for everybody. It’s been in the making for over a year, and has been available in limited beta for a while, but now everybody who uses Pandora can check it out.
WebProNews spoke with Pandora CTO and Head of Product Tom Conrad about the new version. It looks like they moved up their launch date from what he told us, but you can watch the interview here:
Here are the features as they laid out in the announcement:
Simplified Station Creation – Enhanced auto-complete choices and personalized suggestions make creating new stations and discovering new music or comedy more intuitive and personal.
Discovery of Music with Friends – Enhanced listener profiles and a new music feed offer a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora. The music feed will roll out slowly over the course of the coming days. In addition to the prominent new “share” button, stations now have their own URLs, making it super easy for listeners to share favorite stations via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
Improved Control – Prominent and ubiquitous access to familiar player control buttons including Play, Pause, Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down icons helps listeners to easily personalize their music and comedy stations. A new shuffle feature also allows listeners to shuffle any collection of stations to add variety to their listening experience.
Enhanced Artist Information – An option to learn more about the music, find lyrics, read artists’ biographies and expand the album art size.
Unlimited listening – We’ve removed the 40 hours listening cap – you can now listen as much as you want for free.
Maybe the new design will keep people who are flocking to other services like Last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Turntable.fm, Rhapsody, etc. The online music space isn’t getting any easier to compete in. Let’s not forget things like Amazon, iCloud, Google Music, and mSpot either.
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