Pandora Joins the Music Streaming Wars

This week Pandora launched Pandora Premium, the company's new on-demand streaming service meant to compete directly with Spotify and Apple Music.  While introducing new products into any market is a good thing to fuel competition, I believe Pandora will fall pretty flat, and here is why.

Switching streaming services is way more complicated than switching brands of paper towels, it takes serious commitment. Convincing consumers to switch to a new service means spending the time and effort to switch over all of their current music and playlists, not to mention losing their favorite pre-made and automatically-updating playlists. In other words, the new product being offered needs to have some large differentiators from the rest of the pack to be successful.

So the question remains, does Pandora Premium seem worth the switch?  While the product is not being used by consumers yet, the description proclaims less-than-exciting service differentiators.  The two main selling points for Pandora Premium are its use of recommendations and its interface.  Pandora Premium tries to focus on giving consumers a more personalized experience with better recommendations, looking less towards new releases.  I can understand why some people would like that, but one of the major features that made streaming so wildly popular in the first place was its emphasis on listening to new music instantly.  In fact, some artists choose to exclusively stream their new albums on specific streaming services.  

Now for Pandora Premium's interface.  It sports a very sleek and clean design, featuring a color-adapting "now playing" page based off of each album art as shown below.  As appealing as the product looks, consumers are not going to switch services for just the look.  Besides that, Pandora Premium sports the same features as its competitors, including downloadable playlists, search capability, $10 price, and on-demand song choice.

Overall, this product could very well bring some new consumers from Pandora's free streaming service, but the chances of people switching from their current service are slim to none.  The lesson here is simple: being different is everything when breaking into a competitive market, and Pandora misses that mark.