Pandora and Spotify, two of the most popular online music services, have updates bringing new features to their fans.
Pandora’s latest addition is the ability for users to create genre-based digital radio stations, instead of relying solely on songs or artists as a jumping-off point. At the launch of the new feature there were 100 genres made available covering different decades, including traditional genres like classic rock and current country hits and more specialized genres like Classic Indie Radio and Christmas Blues.
This may seem like old news to some users, but Pandora readily clarified the announcement. According to a Pandora spokesperson, “a limited number of genres were an option as a pre-existing station, but they were never a personalized seed, like an artist, song or composer could be. Now Pandora is allowing genres to be a seed for a personalized user station for the very first time.”
The difference is the ability to customize and personalize the seeded stations and the introduction of more current content and chart-topping singles included in these genre-based stations.
Pandora said that “this change was driven by user feedback.”
The change is available on all of Pandora’s platforms, but it may not appear so at first. Users of the premium Pandora One desktop client must go to Pandora’s Web site and update their existing PC client so that these genre-based stations can be added directly from the client.
The European rock star Spotify has updated its desktop client with a new “Folders” feature that lets users sort their playlists into folders within the service. According to Spotify, this was one of the most requested features the service hears about. Spotify’s new client also gives users a better visual search, shows pictures of other users that subscribe to user-generated playlists and offers full integration of the official Spotify Twitter feed. Spotify also tossed in support for Windows 7 Snap, Jump list and Taskbar features.
Spotify said the service improvements come from because of its success with shared playlists. “With the recent introduction of Spotify Social we’ve seen millions of playlists be shared between friends and family. With millions of great playlists being created and shared we’ve looked to make it even easier for Spotify users to manage them with today’s introduction of playlist folders,” said the company.
With these two major services introducing fan-requested offerings, they’re likely to see an increase in usage from their existing user base. By making these new features shareable, both services have some chance of picking up new customers. Pandora stands a good chance of securing users that want more of a traditional radio-station feel, while Spotify has a chance of picking up new users whose friends and family share more playlists because of the increased ease of functionality.