14 DAY TRIAL // The music streaming market is going into high gear as everyone seems to be stepping up their game and newcomers are getting in to grab a piece of the action. The problem is, there isn't that much “action” to go around, very few of these services making any real money. Pandora is one of those few and the company is on its way to profitability this year. In the meantime it is countering the increased threats with a couple of new and long overdue sharing features for Twitter and Facebook.
“When I think about my connection with music, I think about three impulses: the impulse to discover, the impulse to buy, and the impulse to share. Here at Pandora we've had [to] discover and buy bits covered for some time, but it's been frustrating to use Pandora to share the music you’re encountering with your friends. You could send an email or embed a widget on MySpace, but in the age of Twitter and Facebook our offering has been pretty spartan. That all changed tonight,” Pandora CEO Tom Conrad wrote.
Until now, the only way to share songs or stations from Pandora with friends was sending them an email which even Pandora recognizes was pretty old school. There was a MySpace widget as well but who uses MySpace anymore these days. Now it’s all about Twitter and Facebook and Pandora finally made the step to introduce real sharing options at a time when share buttons for these services seem almost ubiquitous.
The new share buttons are featured front and center, close to the playback control ones. The functionality is nothing new but it didn't have to be. For Twitter Pandora implemented a custom interface, using the Twitter API as a back-end, which allows users to tweet out a song or a station but also edit their message before posting it. There is also the option of automating the process by saving a default message.
For Facebook, Pandora uses Connect, a standard method of integrating Facebook functionality. The feature allows you to post songs or stations to your News Feed but also to the profile. Interestingly, users will also be able to listen to song previews, only 30 seconds of the song, on Facebook itself. Finally, Pandora is also promoting a feature that was actually available for quite some time though most users were unaware of, the possibility to gift stations. Users can create their own custom station with up to five songs. They can then customize the look of the card and add a message to it after which they can send it to their friends by email. The new features are already live and available to Pandora users.
