Pandora officially unveils its long-awaited Spotify competitor

That Pandora was planning to launch a full fledged Spotify competitor was no secret. The company said as much last year when it bought the ashes of Rdio, which had filed for bankruptcy. But today, at a lavish, over-the-top event in New York City, Pandora gave a small group of VIPs and press a look at the new streaming service. It’s called Pandora Premium, and just as you’d expect, it offers on-demand access to a massive music catalog — and it looks a LOT like Rdio, from the brief glance we have seen so far. But Pandora is leveraging the years of information it has about how its users listen to music to provide the all-important recommendations necessary to help people find new songs to listen to.

Pandora CEO Tim Westergren thinks Pandora has created the “first truly premium music service” — and that “premium means personal.” Following that statement, he played a quick video showing off the main features of the service. All of the thumbs-up you have given songs over the years will be used to show you songs, artists, and albums you might be interested in. If you start building a playlist, Pandora Premium will suggest songs for you to add and even do it automatically. And, of course, you can take all of these songs offline.

By default, the Pandora home screen looks identical to now — all your recently played stations and full collection of stations is found in the “my music” section. But it also keeps created playlists and albums that you love in one combined list. It doesn’t force you into a category first — but of course, you can filter down to artists, albums, stations and playlists if you’re so inclined.

The “now playing” screen is also redesigned, with a bold colored background that changes based on the album artwork for the song you’re listening to. Naturally, the thumbs up and down icons are still here, and every time you thumbs-up a song, it gets added to an automatically-generated playlist. And that playlist pulls in every single song you’ve ever given a thumbs-up to. If you’ve been using Pandora for a long time, that list could get very, very long indeed.

The playlist feature in particular seems really interesting. Pandora noted that lots of Rdio users had “playlist orphans” where you add a handful of songs to a playlist but don’t actually go through the trouble of fleshing it out beyond those initial choices. Pandora will now let you automatically add songs based on similarities in the Music Genome Project, and you can of course remove songs that you’re not interested in.

Pandora also says that it has redesigned the search experience. It says that most services use popularity-based search rankings — so everyone gets the same results as they type. But Pandora Premium will personalize search by user. It’ll take into account things that you’ve searched for before and music you like so that the search results popping up are more personalized to the user.

The “browse” screen now features a “new music” section that’s somewhat similar to what Spotify does with Discover Weekly. But rather than present a playlist of personalized songs, Pandora will show you a personalized selection of full albums based on your listening history. Instead of digging into a specific genre every week and finding albums you want to hear, Pandora will surface them for you. If you have eclectic tastes, they should all be represented here. When you finish playing an album, the “autoplay” feature (taken from Rdio) will start playing more similar music to match the tone of what you just finished.

Westergren kicked off the event by recounting how he helped start building the Music Genome Project years before Pandora eventually launched in 2005 — long before most streaming music services. He then mentioned how music has fully gone online, with a wonderfully vast collection of music that’s hard to understand and navigate. To get that catalog of music to the lister are on demand solutions like Apple Music and Spotify — but he thinks that isn’t the way to go. “Giving the keys to the record store” isn’t the best way for people to find music.

This announcement comes after a busy few months for Pandora. The company recently went through a full-scale rebrand in advance of the Premium service, and it also revamped its existing $5/month paid “Plus” service that cuts out ads, lets you skip more tracks and offers some offline features. And now, the company is one of the few streaming services to offer a free service alongside two different paid options.

Unfortunately, there’s no specific timeline or pricing for Pandora Premium yet. The service should launch in Q1 of 2017, but Pandora said its VIPs will get a chance to try the service before it launches. Additionally, the company didn’t actually say how much Pandora Premium would cost. In all likelihood, it’ll hit the $9.99 per month price point that basically all other services offer, but we’ll have to wait to confirm that.

While it’s hard for a streaming service to really stand out at this point, Pandora Premium looks like it’ll contain the best parts of Rdio’s excellent design and marry it with the massive amount of music knowledge that Pandora has gathered over many years the service has been alive. Hopefully the company will release more details publicly soon.