When it comes to music streaming services, Pandora is possibly the most recognized of the bunch. Some of the less tech savvy people in my life all have Pandora accounts and now they will most likely be excited to know that Pandora has redesigned their site and done away with that silly 40-hour cap for the free service.
What’s under the hood?
Oh Pandora, how I love your new look. According to Pandora’s official blog, since 2010 the good folks at Pandora HQ have been working on bringing you a modern site – which translates to a site based on HTML5. Believe me the wait was worth it. Pandora’s upgrade to HTML5 has translated into a much smoother, faster, and less buggy site that is just a joy to look at.
Show me what you got
Oh boy is she a pretty little thing! First I’d like to draw your attention to the top of the page. One of the first things that stands out is the control panel. It’s clean, elegant, and prominently displayed at the top center of the page. Easy enough to find, identify, it makes sense.
Another well placed tweak was the track info in the center of the page. It’s cleaner, concise, and doesn’t require you to leave the page or open a new tab to find out why the track you’re listening to is rlvnt (hat tip to you Mr. Unchill English Bro for ‘rlvnt’). In truth it encourages you to read up on your favorite bands or discover a new sound entirely.
Music is more fun with friends
This is nothing new to Spotify users, after all Spotify is one of the reasons I’m not posting as many YouTube links on twitter just to let my followers know what I’m listening to (this was annoying as hell for me to do I can only imagine what my followers thought). Now Pandora has taken a page from Spotify (and others like Last.fm) and made sharing as simple as connecting to the appropriate social network or via email.
Final thoughts
The redesign and truly all you can stream option (with ads) are both welcomed changes to Pandora. It truly is one of the better ways to discover new music and give different things a shot, because we can sometimes be set in our musical ways. Functionality has been greatly improved by adopting HTML5; there are far fewer glitches during playback and crashes are pretty much nonexistent.
If you have a neglected Pandora account, give it another shot. I think you’ll like what you see.
Source: Pandora
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