The New Pandora: The Music Genome Project Meets Contemporary Front-End Technologies

Pandora is slowly rolling out its new iteration to premium subscribers. In the coming months, the newly-redesigned service will eventually be available to all users. As a subscriber to the Pandora One service, I’ve been eagerly awaiting for my chance to experience the new Pandora. I’ve spent years listening to Pandora, discovering artists that were similar to my favorites, but new to me sparking interest. 

Pandora has always marketed themselves as using “The Music Genome Project,” an algorithm that helps individuals find artists and songs based on the similarity of an initial user-identified artist/song. As the user begins to listen to the random selections based on this algorithm, liking and disliking the songs being played provide more criteria for the algorithm to evolve. Because of this, Pandora has separated themselves from their competition. With Spotify entering the scene and posing a threat to the music exploration market, this key marketing feature has kept Pandora strong. Although, one issue that concerned me was their user interface.

A shortcoming of Pandora’s service was its clunky web interface. Mostly flash-based, Pandora up until this point was sluggish, prone to freezing, and just created an overall poor user experience. It was unfortunate to me as I loved this service so much. I upgraded my account about five months ago and haven’t regretted it one bit, drawing much satisfaction from the no-ads and desktop app afforded to premium subscribers. Pandora even sent me a free shirt to say thanks for my ongoing Twitter support.

I was pleased to read TechCrunch’s exclusive look at the new Pandora. Pandora’s new interface is fresh, clean, and promises higher responsiveness to its user. It is true that I have been eager to use this new service. As of this morning, I am now an official user of the new Pandora.

The interface is clean, well-designed, and has the features of the old Pandora, but reinvented with new front-end technologies. The HTML5 makes the interface look app-like, allowing the user to navigate without leaving a single page. I can configure everything imaginable without having my music interrupted or a new window open up. The front-end technologies employed in this user interface provide amazingly fast response times. Music plays within seconds after being loaded and scrolling through what has been played is seamless. 

Pandora is also revving up the social aspect to their service by allowing users to follow their friends by connecting to Facebook or email. I can’t quite get this to work for me yet, as the service still has a few bugs.

Front-end technologies are becoming increasingly important as a component of creating a cutting-edge website. HTML5 and CSS3 create an opportunity for a richer web experience, while reducing site loading times, a convention that has been absent from cumbersome flash websites. As a studio, we have embraced these new technologies, utilizing the services and talents of some of the most skilled developers. Web browsers are moving in a direction (Internet Explorer included) to make their browsers fully support HTML5 and CSS3, making a holistic, standardized platform for contemporary web technologies to be made viewable by the world at large.

To learn more about these exciting new front-end technologies, check out this link.