Pandora’s Project Genome Wants to Help You Find a Perfect Podcast

The battle for users attention is not only done on social media or music apps but it’s coming for podcasts as well. Pandora is worried about Spotify gaining too many users and, in response, is intensifying its efforts to launch a podcast platform, a spin-off of its revolutionary Music Genome recommendation engine.

While Spotify is content to offer you custom made playlists based on your history (Daily Mix, Discover Weekly), Pandora wants to go for the connoisseur market and offer endless customization options. The Pandora Music Genome launched back in March lets you build playlists based on anything from moods to activities, allowing you granular options like over 450 music attributes. You can even pick the type of guitar you want your playlist to feature!

Now, the same principle is going to be applied to the Pandora Podcast Genome, which Pandora hopes to launch early next year, snatching the podcast market from arch-rival Spotify.

“Pandora created personalized music discovery — that doesn’t exist in podcasts. You might look at a chart, you might see what your friends are listening to. There’s nothing personalized about that. We’re building for podcasts what we did for music, which is the podcast genome,” said Pandora CEO Roger Lynch.

With 170 million active users versus Pandora’s 71.4 million, Spotify won the war for tunes. Now, the battle moves towards a smaller niche that advertisers are eyeing greedily, since it’s showing an impressive growth rate. According to this report, the podcast creators’ revenue increased 86% since 2017, which means more people are discovering the wonders of Marc Maron’s show or the thrills of the true-crime Last Podcast on the Left. Until Pandora Podcast Genome launches, you’ll just have to settle for recommendations from your friends.

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