Amid a new round of boasting about the relative merits of streaming services and traditional radio, Pandora is wading into the fray again.
The company claims its personalised Thumbprint Radio station is now “the most popular radio station on earth” after attracting 20 million listeners and generating more than 5.5bn spins.
Thumbprint radio launched in mid-December 2015 as Pandora’s cross between Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Deezer’s Flow – a “hyper-personalised station” based on all the tracks someone has ever thumbed-up on Pandora, plus newer songs its algorithm thinks they’ll like.
The figures mean we can make a comparison with Discover Weekly. In its first nine months, Pandora’s Thumbprint Radio has generated around 611m streams a month, while it took Discover Weekly 10 months to reach 5bn streams (so 500m streams a month) from more than 40 million listeners.
Another stat on Pandora’s Thumbprint Radio: 7.4 million of its listeners are aged 13-24, which should be decent fodder for Pandora’s ad sales teams to pull in more brands.
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