Unlike its strongest competitors and all their customization features, Pandora, specifically its original station listening experience, has been more of a “lean back” kind of thing. By bringing other products like Pandora Plus and Pandora Premium, they’re starting to compete with the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, etc and bringing more options to their users. Now they’re bringing a bit more customization to the radio-style experience of the service with the new Pandora Modes, available for both free and premium subscribers.
When using the station style of listening, you can now choose from five different modes to customize your music experience. The original algorithm style is still there of course and is now called My Station. There is now a Crowd Faves mode where you can listen to the most thumbed-up songs in the particular station you chose. Deep Cuts mode allows you to, well, go deeper into the catalog of the station you’re listening to, whether it’s the artist itself or the genre.
Choosing the Discovery mode will let you listen to more artists that normally aren’t played on the station. From its name itself, the Newly Released mode will let you listen to the latest releases from the artist or genre that you chose for your station. Lastly, if you want to listen to one artist alone and they have an extensive catalogue, then you can choose the Artist Only mode.
To choose the Pandora Mode, go to your favorite stations or create a new one and under the station name, you’ll see the six options we mentioned above. If you’ve never used Pandora before but want to try this out, you can create a station by choosing an artist, song, or genre.
However, this is only available for the web version for now but they will make it available for the Android app “in the coming months”.
SOURCE: Pandora
