Pandora ‘drops’ latest personalised smart playlist feature for premium users

Pandora has launched The Drop, a new personalised playlist for Premium listeners, offering new releases and recommendations from artists based on their listening habits.

It is the latest in the platform’s year-long strategy of personalised playlists to convert users to convert free users to loyal payers and uses the Music Genome Project’s recommendations.

In May it introduced soundtracks consisting of mixes.

Product managers Evan Paul & Sam Barrett blogged: “We all know the feeling of discovering a new track you love.

“Whether it’s during your morning commute, your evening run, or while you’re getting ready for a night out, the feeling is instantaneous – you know you’ve found something that you’re going to be playing on repeat over and over again.

“Here at Pandora, we’re obsessed with making those moments happen as frequently as possible for our listeners.”

Pandora started testing the idea in March for selected users and says that since the, 790,000 users listened o at least one soundtrack playing 21.4 million songs across a collective one million hours.

Energy is the most popular playlist theme, followed by hip hop, country, R&B, party, pop and happy.

The Drop sees the service play catch-up with Spotify’s Discover Weekly/Release Radar and SoundCloud’s freshly minted Weekly.

With 14 tracks at launch, Pandora plans to have a total of 100 new tracks, listed in order of their release date and automatically updated each day when new music enters.

Release Radar only has 30 songs at any one given time.