Sprint Offers Pandora Personalised Radio Station on Phones

The USA based Sprint Nextel says that it is launching a mobile version of the online music service company, Pandora. Listening to Pandora is simple: users enter a song or artist that they like, and within seconds, Pandora delivers a personalized radio station with a continuous stream of songs that fit the same sound and style.

The songs are selected based on the Music Genome Project, Pandora's proprietary system that utilizes highly trained musicians to analyze songs one at a time. These musicians identify hundreds of different musical qualities of each recording, including melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics and vocals.

Information about the current song (including title, artist and album) is displayed on the phone's color screen, and customers can also scroll backwards to see this information for recently played songs. Additionally, customers can rate songs with the touch of a button with either "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" so Pandora can immediately adjust the station's programming, and they can pause a song as well as skip a song that they don't want to hear.

Sprint customers can bookmark a song, and the song name and artist will be saved. The bookmark can serve as a reminder to purchase the song later on the Sprint Music Store.

"Pandora is like that one friend who everyone wants to have - someone who really knows and loves music and who can recommend a long list of bands and songs after you mention what you've been listening to lately," said Jeff Luther, director of entertainment wireless data for Sprint. "Pandora is a great way to break out of the same songs on your playlist and hear some new music that you may have never found otherwise. It's the latest example of the many innovative ways that Sprint delivers music on the one device people carry with them throughout the day.""

Posted to the site on 24th May 2007