Is Pandora’s New Facelift Better?

Wow, everyone stand back and hold on!  Is your heading spinning because mine is reeling with all the recent changes. Today Facebook has made changes on their UI without warning, this week Netflix split into two companies dropping  shares nearly 160 points in the last two months but now “et tu Pandora?”.  Mon dieu, not my beloved Pandora!

If you’re not familiar with Pandora, you should. It’s another widely used Cloud-based ‘radio’ where you select artists and it magically creates stations based on artist music style. I really like the surreptitious discovery of new artists using Pandora and I prefer to use it at work. In June it went IPO but soon after has been chased by other Cloud based stations arising such as Amazon and Google (not forgetting to mention competitors Spotify & Turntable.fm).

OK, so I get it. Pandora’s Tim Westergren addresses competition but is the new Pandora better for us users? Let’s take a quick look and use my profile as an example.

Above is a snapshot of my new Pandora Profile. It lists my music stations in the center (with little icon images of the CD/ “album” covers) but the bad thing about it? You have to scroll down to take a gander at all the stations (kind of a drag). Notice all the added advertising on the right, it’s probably to compensate for the removal of their 40-hour per month cap on their free service. The left column is reminiscent of the relatively older version of Facebook.

The ads are  A LOT bigger! This is certain to satisfy advertisers.

After having to constantly be mindful of Facebook’s ever-changing settings I appreciate Pandora’s upfront new privacy settings as I logged in today. It asks users whether you wish your listening activity to be public & whether you prefer listeners to leave comments on your profile. It’s all part of the new Pandora’s social interaction push. The old Pandora also gave the option to import friends from  Facebook, but today (9/21/11) my Facebook friends are not here! Maybe the big social reveal will be tomorrow.

One big difference I noticed on the account settings was whether you should  allow Pandora to display explicit content on your stations. Hmm, explicit content, what could that mean? Now I am no prude, but if you’re like me and you enjoy listening to music at work its embarrassing to have ads of eligible men to date in your geographic area. (I can’t image what explicit images Pandora would show if I allowed explicit content but I assume they are also referring to parental control and blocking explicit lyrics, not only ads).  Perhaps maybe, if I’m feeling frisky, I’ll check the other box and I’ll report back, but for now this setting is just fine.

I don’t see the big social element of Pandora yet. Could it be the ‘Thumbs Up/Down’ button next to the radio station? I think the Thumbs Up/Down allowed users to virtually ‘teach’ stations to play songs  that are similar to the artist station, it’s what distinguishes Pandora from other online music radio. To me, Pandora allows me to discover new artists and I think its effective.  I’m looking forward to sharing my favorite music with friends. I’ve always felt that music should be shared on social networks since so often a song can describe an emotion so much better than words.