New Pandora Extras: Learn More About Your Favorite Artists
Pandora, the personalized internet radio service, has rolled out a significant upgrade with a host of new features called “Pandora Extras.” Extras include additional info on the currently playing artist, a collection of genre-based stations, and the ability to connect and share music with friends.
The additional options for the current playing artist will be a welcome feature for Pandora fans. The information was previously available, but not directly within the player. The new integration makes it much easier to find out more about an artist, album or song and there are options to bookmark or purchase the music. There are also recommendations based on similar artists.
The preset stations feature isn’t going to do much for you if you’re a heavy Pandora user and you’ve already customized and tricked out your stations, but they might be a nice way for newcomers to get up and running quickly.
The friends feature is more suspect. Yes, it appears Pandora is bent on continuing to add social networking-like features. The new options allow you to see what friends are listening to, sort of a social element for Pandora’s music recommendations features.
I’m with Mike Arrington on this one, Techcrunch posted a piece earlier today entitled “Pandora, Please Don’t Try Too Hard To Be Last.fm.”
Indeed, the reason I prefer Pandora to Last.fm is precisely because it doesn’t encumber its interface with useless clutter and endless social networking capabilities. There’s nothing wrong with the new features and so far they don’t intrude and it’s easy to ignore them, but I really hope this is about as far as Pandora goes with the social features. Unfortunately, given that the last upgrade also added social features, I doubt that’ll be the case.
It would be nice if Pandora spent some more energy refining its music database, which still doesn’t know about more obscure artists, rather than chasing the social features of Last.fm.
Still, Pandora remains my favorite source of music on the internet and the new features, especially the artist information features are welcome additions. The team behind Pandora says this is just the beginning of a planned series of updates so we’ll keep you posted.
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