Pandora's New Website Points to an On-demand Future
The redesign puts album art and navigation front and center.

Pandora has generated a lot of buzz about its rumored on-demand platform based on Rdio, and is working on an extensive re-branding ahead of that. It recently unveiled a new logo, and today launched a completely revamped website. As part of the new changes, you'll now see radio stations in a grid of album art instead of an ordered list, much like with Google Play Music. The control bar with thumbs up/thumbs down, play, pause and song information has moved from the top of the screen to the very bottom now as well.

The design makes lets you navigate "between past, present and future listening," Pandora says, making it easier to create and organize stations. Interestingly, Pandora cribbed from Spotify and is offering tour dates on both the Now Playing and artist profile pages. Finally, you'll be able to replay and skip tracks, provided you're willing to watch a video commercial, while subscribers to the $5 Pandora Plus option will be able to do it ad-free.

There are no options to stream songs on demand, but that will likely change soon. Pandora will reportedly launch a $10 on-demand service like Spotify or Apple Music based on the technology it purchased from bankrupt Rdio. When it arrives, Pandora plans to expand to new countries and has ambitions to triple its subscriber base to 11 million by 2020.

Despite having 78 million monthly listeners and 3.9 million subscribers, the company lost $170 million last year. Given all that, it no doubt wants a strong launch for its on-demand site, starting with the new logo and website refresh.

Pandora is not available in my country (yet) but I thought of it as a simple Internet radio, but the concept seems rather nice:
"With Pandora you can explore this vast trove of music to your heart's content. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs, artists or genres into Pandora and let the Music Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings - new and old, well known and completely obscure - to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you."

Anyone tried if it is similar experience to that of Spotify and if it is at same (or better) bitrate?