telecom

Pandora Premieres Is Music To T-Mobile's Ears

As Pandora moves to compete with other streaming music services, T-Mobile has signed on as the signature sponsor of the Internet radio station’s Pandora Premieres offering. 

The new station provides Pandora users with the opportunity to listen to full albums before their official release date. While the site has offered albums from John Fogerty and Laura Marling, the brand has also been able to reach the growing Hispanic market with the release last week of La Maquinaria Nortena’s “Vives en Mi” album. 

Unlike Pandora’s traditional offering (which builds radio stations based on a person’s song or artist preference), the Premieres channel allows users to listen to an entire album (and tracks on that album) as many times as they’d like without commercial interruption. “It’s a new kind of station that allows people to hear new albums a week before their release,” Mike Reid, Pandora’s executive director of multicultural, tells Marketing Daily.

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While helpful in reaching mainstream audiences, the station has a chance to reach a large Hispanic market as well, Reid says. According to the company, Pandora is the largest Hispanic radio station in the United States, featuring more than 8,000 Latin artists and 80,000 songs. “We’ve seen that we’ve got a sizable multicultural market,” Reid says. “We’ve got more people listening to Pandora Hispanic than any other station in the country.”

Although T-Mobile executives were unavailable for comment, the Premieres sponsorship, which runs through 2013, gives the company a chance to associate its brand with something special, Reid says. “This is the first time we’ve put to market [a Hispanic] release,” he says. “From T-Mobile’s standpoint, they get something new and exclusive.”

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