Playlist.com, The Echo Nest to pit 80 million personalized Net radio channels against Pandora’s service
Paul Maloney
The Next Web (via Hypebot) reports Playlist.com is transitioning each of the 80 million user-created playlists it hosts into “smart” online radio stations. And with them, Playlist.com says it will offer a “Pepsi Challenge”-style listening test to compare its new recommendation service to Pandora’s artist stations.
RAIN readers may remember Playlist.com relaunched in July as a webcast service after telling listeners record labels “forced” it to abandon its on-demand, playlist-creating model (see our coverage here). Playlist.com is now working with music intelligence vendor The Echo Nest, which has taken each user playlist and created a custom radio station for it.
The service has a library of 20 million licensed songs, and offers 500 genre-based stations, in addition to the brand new playlist-generated streams.
Robert Davidorf, Playlist.com CEO, said, “We feel that Pandora is a little bit stagnant in [terms of features]…I think their service is not something that they’ve innovated on from a consumer standpoint very much in the past several years.”
