If you’ve been listening to Pandora for years and dutifully doling out thumbs-ups to your favorite jams, all those upvotes are about to come in handy. Thumbprint Radio, a new Pandora feature that launched this week, takes all the songs you’ve liked and creates a customized, cross-genre streaming station.
Although the artist- and song-themed stations aren’t going away, the new feature represents a slightly different approach for the streaming music service. Pandora has been a “music discovery” engine much longer than today’s other music-streaming options—most of which didn’t exist back when it launched in 2005. Now, it's sort of—finally—getting into the playlist game.
"We see traditional Pandora stations as the ultimate discovery tool, and Thumbprint Radio brings something completely new," says Erik Schmidt, a senior scientist at Pandora. "We’re trying to create the playlist you might make for yourself if you had the time to put it together."
While Pandora is finally getting playlist tools (which Spotify and Apple Music/iTunes have long had), those other service have folded in Pandora-like features—but they did it awhile ago. Discovery engines and radio streams have been included in all the big-name services, from Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists to Apple Music’s Beats One Radio to the Songza-powered stations in Google Play Music.
Those other services, though, have at least some element of human curation. Pandora is still leaning on its algorithms to create these stations. They're just completely different algorithms, and ones that allow more precise control over what comes up on Pandora than the existing radio stations.
"We’ve developed an arsenal of entirely new personalized recommenders for this project," Schmidt explains. "The station spins a high rate of a user’s thumbs, along with other tracks based directly on their interaction with the service."
In terms of scope, it's similar to what you've been able to do in Pandora by shuffling playback across all your stations. However, Schmidt says the new feature is a bit more complicated than simply dumping all your “liked” songs into their own radio station.
"Thumbprint will evolve along with your tastes," Schmidt says. "Like traditional stations, it will respond to thumbs provided within the station, but it will also incorporate new thumbs from other stations."
Rather than just a personal stream of greatest hits, the feature is also built for music discovery. New releases and other potentially unheard tracks are added to your playlist, right between songs you’ve thumbs-upped and songs Pandora has pegged as similar. The Thumbprint stations vary significantly from user to user, but you can share a link to your own station in the player.
Despite those discovery features, Schmidt says the main goal here is to provide quick access to your favorite tunes, much as a playlist would.
"It's your favorite tracks, from your favorite stations, along with hyper-personalized recommendations," Schmidt says. "We like to think about what we’ve built as a journey through your tastes. We’ll create discovery experiences from time to time, but the primary goal is to create the playlist you’d make for yourself."
