Pandora has yet another full-scale music discovery/custom music channel competitor, in addition to sites like iHeartRadio, and Jango: Spotify. Spotify has unveiled its own version of user-programmable Internet music stations, Spotify Radio. We recently reported the social media music discovery functionality was brought in from CBS’s Last.FM. Now the site has custom music discovery as well.
The new service will allow the creation of an unlimited number of stations, and allow consumers and unlimited number of “skips” to bypass songs they don’t like. That’s something Pandora does not offer.
The company said it will start rolling out the new service in the next few days, along with Spotify Apps.
You can be the DJ and skip between stations and tracks, or choose a station and just go with the flow. If you like what you hear, you can save the song to a playlist or play it again on demand.
Like Pandora, starting a custom radio station is easy. Click “Start Artist Radio” at the top of any artist page or just drag a track to “Radio” in the left sidebar. Spotify will make a radio station of similar music.
“Thanks to our all-new intelligent recommendation engine and multi-million track library, Spotify Radio is a music discovery experience without equal,” says Spotify.
Spotify offers its service for free over the Web with ads, but offer subscriptions for a version without the ads and more expensive subscriptions for those who want to use Spotify on mobile devices, too.
