Product Breakdown: 3 Learnings from the Pandora App
Product Breakdown analyzes a different product every week and summarizes noteworthy learnings into a short article. We believe that the best way to master good product and UX practices is to learn from others.
Introduction
Pandora is a digital radio company with over 79.4M active users and 3.9M paying subscribers. Pandora’s mission is to “only play music you’ll love”. It achieves this by learning your musical preferences and then playing a stream of songs that match your taste.
Some of Pandora’s key metrics (as per their 10K) are listener hours, advertising revenue per thousand listener hours (adRPMs) and subscription revenue. A focus on these top line metrics helps explain Pandora’s product philosophy.
1. Pandora’s contextual tutorial is an effective way to onboard users
Unlike many apps that simply explain all the different features upfront in a slideshow, Pandora relies on context and teaches users new features when they become relevant. For example, when you play your first song, Pandora teaches you about the like/dislike button. Then, when you click on “like” for the first time, it reminds you about the importance of the “like” action. There are similar screens for “fine-tuning a station” when you change the station, and “upgrading to the ad-free version” when you close a pop-up ad.
Teaching users about personalization of radio stations is critical to Pandora’s success (it’s what differentiates them from their competitors after all) which is probably why Pandora went with a more engaging in-context tutorial instead of just hitting users with a slideshow of features on first launch (something that is more easily skipped).
2. Pandora’s in-app lyrics, artist info keep you visually engaged
If you click on the album art of the song that’s playing, you get the option to easily view the lyrics, song info, and artist info. This is a really nice feature in itself (we would love to see lyrics in the Spotify mobile app) but, it probably also helps Pandora improve their ad revenue.
Pandora’s business model heavily relies on advertising revenue and along with audio ads, they also have pop-up ads in the app that users can click on. One challenge with surfacing visual ads in a music app is that users are often not looking at their screen when listening to music. Lyrics and song info help get around that problem by keeping eyeballs in the app and give Pandora the opportunity to squeeze in a pop-up ad every now and then.
3. Pandora has an alarm clock that wakes you up to music
In the settings menu, is an alarm clock feature that allows you to wake up to the radio station of your choice. We think that is a really clever feature and a nod to the golden age of the radio when people would use their radios as their alarm clocks.
It would be great to see Apple bake this functionality into iOS and utilize the newly launched Beats radio station as one of the options for their alarm — a feature that could ensure users start every day with Apple Music!
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