AfterDawn: News

Pandora announces redesign, 100 millionth user

Pandora has announced today that the streaming music service has reached 100 million users, with 36 million being active monthly.

Additionally, the company has completely revamped their design, including the desktop and mobile versions of the site, and the redesign will go live in the very near future.



You can view some pics of the new design (and functionality) here.

Says CTO Tim Conrad:

I’ve been looking at it for seven years. I was ready to give it a fresh coat of paint. We started on it about a year ago. But even earlier than that, we’d been talking about it. There were core navigation problems that needed fixing. At first, we had been talking about more incremental changes, with the site still operating in Flash. But then last summer, it became clear that browsers with full HTML5 capabilities had gained enough support. We realized we could do the full Pandora experience without Flash.

Pandora recently went public, raising over $100 million and now has a market value of $3 billion.

The company says it now has 3.6 percent of the U.S. radio listening market share, a 50 percent increase from last year.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 12 Jul 2011 14:12

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• 8 comments

• blueboy09

  Don't know for sure if the facelift is the real answer, but hey I'm game to check it out it when it's ready.
  

  Chance prepares the favored mind. Look up once in a while and you might learn something. - BLUEBOY

  12.7.2011 22:11 #1

• KillerBug

  I highly doubt a facelift is going to fix anything...they need to fix their song selector. When I type a band it finds something close and starts playing, but then the next song is radically out of place (it went from Children of Bodom to Britany Spears once). Since they only let you skip 10 bad tracks, the result is that you can only listen to a handful of songs in a session...sometimes only the first song.
  

  http://www.killerbug.net

  13.7.2011 04:32 #2

• dEwMe

  To be fair I have noticed that the longer I use it and the more diligent I am at letting it know the songs I like/don't like the better it gets at playing what I want to hear. Yeah it's not 100% but then as I pay nothing for it I sure can't complain...
  
  

  Just my $0.02,
  
  dEwMe

  13.7.2011 13:20 #3

• lawndog

  I've got several playlists with pandora. Free account. The key to hearing the songs that fit is to thumbs up or thumbs down the songs.I've got about 10 playlists total, and 3 of them I've tweaked so much that I know and like every song it plays. I'll admit I really like Pandora and think they do a really good job, and hope that they stay free. More then likely I'll end up paying for it though
  

  14.7.2011 21:50 #4

• Mez

  Originally posted by KillerBug: I highly doubt a facelift is going to fix anything...they need to fix their song selector. When I type a band it finds something close and starts playing, but then the next song is radically out of place (it went from Children of Bodom to Britany Spears once). Since they only let you skip 10 bad tracks, the result is that you can only listen to a handful of songs in a session...sometimes only the first song.
  That first song pisses me off as well but they are trying to get a fix on what you like. They know you liked the song you picked. I think their selection algorithym is in a class by itsself. I would prefer if they played that first, why not? You have to put your imput in if the selection engine is going to work well. It is one of the only places I can find new artists that I like. I give Pandora 2 thumbs up!
  
  A face lift to a radio station is stupid unless they allow for easy picking of thumbs up tunes you have not heard. That might even please Killerbug. Do they really think I play their music and watch their screen????????????? Morons!

  15.7.2011 08:25 #5

• Mr-Movies

  I can't say the face lift does anything for me. I use the thumbs to rate but one problem with their system is you can't reverse a fat thumb, no pun intended. LOL I have several play lists and they all work well for me I really like the service over all. I also wish you could use thumbs on songs that have already finished playing as I don't always catch it in time.
  

  15.7.2011 16:50 #6

• phobet

  I have to say that I really like the Pandora service, and have found the $36/year worth every penny. I have multiple music sources for my car system (hd radio, xm, iPod, cd, Pandora via Bluetooth), and found the Pandora stream to be of very high quality. The dynamic range is comparable to the cd, hd, and iPod (when playing a .wave format file, as opposed to playing crappy mp3). The only thing wonky about it is sometimes the song will abruptly end, but this happens only when I'm moving, so it could probably be attributed to cell tower switching.

  16.7.2011 06:14 #7

• phobet

  I have to say that I really like the Pandora service, and have found the $36/year worth every penny. I have multiple music sources for my car system (hd radio, xm, iPod, cd, Pandora via Bluetooth), and found the Pandora stream to be of very high quality. The dynamic range is comparable to the cd, hd, and iPod (when playing a .wave format file, as opposed to playing crappy mp3). The only thing wonky about it is sometimes the song will abruptly end, but this happens only when I'm moving, so it could probably be attributed to cell tower switching.

  16.7.2011 06:14 #8