Pandora launches AMPcast, for artist-injected messages to listeners

Pandora has announced a feature that allows musicians to easily speak to their listeners, similar to a radio station’s pre-recorded musician promo, but with more real-time control. Called AMPcast, it is a dead-simple tool for musicians connected to the Artist Management Platform (AMP) to speak a message into a phone, and have it ripple out through their plays in Pandora streams.

The feature is a next-generation extension of Artist Audio Messages, created by Pandora founder Tim Westergren, who is participating in the marketing of AMPcast. In the older system, messages were studio-created (or home-studio created). With AMPcast, the musician simply speaks the message into the phone, assigns its placement, and it’s done in seconds. think of it as instant contextual podcasting.

When do the messages get played? When the artist’s music is spun in a Pandora station is the quick answer. Musicians have more exact control, assigning whether the voice message precedes or follows a spin of their track, or as a pre-roll to the start of a station seeded by that artist. Pandora recommends seven to 20 seconds as the optimal length range.

Artists may use the toll for any sort of listener engagement. Notifying listeners of an upcoming concert date, or new music release, are obvious implementations. Artists do not control frequency of message insertion — Pandora doesn’t want too many interruptions. On the listener side, users can opt out of artists messages entirely, or disable them for certain stations.

AMPcast is being rolled out gradually, as usual with Pandora innovations. Rapper G-Eazy, one of the first wave of artist users, is helping with promotion. “Pandora is changing the game with this one,” he says in a video hosted by Westergren (see below).