Pandora today launched a new service called Pandora Premieres, which lets subscribers stream unreleased albums from well-established artist a week in advance. This comes after Google launched its own service called ‘All Access’ to the market at Google I/O last week.
The way Pandora Premieres works is users get access to any track on a featured album, regardless of the order, without any limits to how many times the album is listened to. This can go on for the time period the album is available on the station. In addition some artists will offer exclusive content such as video interviews.
Now the “established” artist tag is a bit blurry as it doesn’t really give any specifics on the kind of artists Pandora is talking about. For instance, will we ever see superstar acts like Jay-Z, Kanye West, or Foo Fighters hit this Premiere section? That question is yet to be answered.
This is an interesting move by Pandora given how the music streaming business is heating up with plenty of valuable candidates in the market for consumers to choose from. Pandora is doing what it has to do to keep its lead in the music streaming business, however, there’s nothing stopping a Spotify or Rdio of doing the same.