With Apple’s new iTunes Radio launching today alongside iOS 7, it’s not that surprising that Pandora is using today to launch version 5.0 of its apps, which also happens to include a brand new experience on iPad and refreshed branding for the entire service.
The company has published two blog posts this morning. The first outlines the company’s new branding strategy, which includes what Pandora calls “refinements to our logo, our app icon, and our visual design.” The tweaks to the app icon and logo, according to Pandora’s Chief Marketing Officer Simon Fleming-Wood, is to honor the company’s past “while looking to the future with a bolder, more modern identity.” You’ll see some of the branding changes carried through both the new iPhone and iPad apps released today, which also get a refreshed look for iOS 7, but also coming soon to Pandora’s website and Android apps too.
The visual design language, which we refer to simply as “lights,” is meant to evoke the interplay of lights from a live show while symbolizing the flow of music from artists to listeners. To introduce our new direction, we created a short video. It is intended to be a declaration of who we are, what we believe, and why we do what we do.
While both apps get visual tweaks today to line up with the new branding, Pandora also published an article on its blog describing some major changes for version 5.0 of its iPad app.
The new iPad app includes an enhanced listening experience with new personalization features such as the ability to view artist suggestions, station details, and easily edit stations with shuffle, renaming, and delete options. There is also new functionality for currently playing songs:
Listeners can explore more about the artist and album that is currently playing as well as easily purchase tracks from iTunes through enriched artist pages that include similar artists and genome traits of the current track spinning, plus lyrics, artist biographies and album discographies.
The new Pandora apps are available on the App Store now. A full list of what’s new is below:
What will you find on the new Pandora for iPad app?
- Enhanced Listening Experience & Personalization – We’ve significantly upgraded core Pandora functionality, such as adding variety to a station with artist suggestions and viewing station details, in addition to giving listeners the ability to easily shuffle, rename and delete stations.
- Deeper Music Discovery & Exploration – Listeners can explore more about the artist and album that is currently playing as well as easily purchase tracks from iTunes through enriched artist pages that include similar artists and genome traits of the current track spinning, plus lyrics, artist biographies and album discographies.
- Your Personal Profile & Music Feed – Your detailed timeline captures music preferences for each individual listener, such as stations created, bookmarked tracks and thumb history with the option for users to make the profile either public or private. The Music Feed offers a centralized place to view music activity, making it easy to explore what friends and other listeners with similar musical tastes are discovering and enjoying on Pandora.
- The Ability to Connect & Share Music with Friends – Social sharing features are available on iPad for the first time, with listeners able to publish their music activity to Facebook with the Pandora Timeline app, as well as manually share links to favorite stations with followers on Twitter.
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Pandora is really going to have to fight for position against a built in solution from Apple, that costs less a year for the ad-free model.
Yet they still left that stupid “accessory connected” screen, so fun to have a black screen telling me the name of my Pioneer head unit, instead of album art/song info or even just the normal pandora app screen. iRadio can’t come quick enough!