Pandora Now Available For Free on Sprint Phones

Pandora today announced that Pandora's personalized Internet radio service will now be available for free on more than 20 Sprint mobile phones. Sprint subscribers who are currently paying the $2.99 subscription to access Pandora on existing Sprint phones will no longer be charged for the Pandora service and the free Pandora application will be available to all Sprint customers who have compatible handsets and a Sprint data plan. Sprint was the first carrier to launch a mobile version of Pandora in May of 2007 and currently supports Pandora on many popular phones, including the Samsung Instinct.
"This is a very significant move for Sprint and for the mobile industry more broadly," said Tim Westergren, Founder of Pandora. "Internet radio is rapidly expanding off the desktop and we're thrilled that we can now offer Pandora for free to Sprint's customers".
In concert with this launch of Pandora for free on Sprint, the Pandora service is also now available on select Windows Mobile handsets with additional new handsets planned to roll out over time.
As with the ad-supported desktop version of Pandora, the mobile experience will include advertising, specifically audio advertising.
Listening to Pandora is simple: users enter a song or artist that they like, and within seconds, Pandora delivers a personalized radio station with a continuous stream of songs that fit the same sound and style. The songs are selected based on the Music Genome Project, Pandora's proprietary system that utilizes highly trained musicians to analyze songs one at a time. These musicians measure hundreds of different musical qualities for each recording, including every detail of melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics and vocals. As the songs play, Pandora users can further refine the playlist with a simple "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." They can also pause a station or skip a song that they don't want to hear.
Pandora on Sprint phones is integrated seamlessly with the online version of Pandora. Up to 100 stations can be saved in a user's account, and they can be enjoyed online at http://www.pandora.com and on Sprint phones anywhere within Sprint's extensive nationwide network. Sprint customers can also create new stations directly on their phones through an easy-to-use interface.
Information about the current song (including title, artist and album) is displayed on the phone's color screen, and customers can also scroll backwards to see this information for recently played songs. Users can easily bookmark songs to their favorites list. Bookmarks can serve as a reminder to purchase the song later on the Sprint Music Store, which offers more than 2.5 million songs that can be downloaded wirelessly on the phone in as little as 30 seconds for only 99 cents each with any data plan.
About Pandora:
http://www.pandora.com/ Pandora ( http://www.pandora.com) is a free, personalized internet radio service, available anytime and anywhere on the PC, in the home and on mobile devices, including the Apple iPhone. Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project, which began in 2000 and is the most thorough analysis of popular music ever undertaken. Each song in this massive collection, which includes Pop, Rock, Jazz, Electronica, Hip Hop, Country, Blues, R&B, Latin and Classical, is analyzed by one of more than 50 trained musicians, and assessed against up to 400 distinct musical attributes (encompassing melody, harmony, rhythm, etc.) to capture its unique musical identity. Pandora uses this information to build playlists based on musical similarity. By simply entering a favorite song or artist, a listener is instantly launched into a personalized listening experience, full of new discovery as Pandora explores their favorite part of the music universe. Listeners can create up to 100 of these personal radio stations and refine them by providing feedback via the Pandora radio tuner. Additionally, listeners can create profiles, search for other listeners in the Pandora community who have similar musical tastes, and find stations built by other listeners, using artist and song names as well as genre and mood search terms. The music analyst team works daily to keep the Music Genome Project updated with the latest releases, emerging artists, and an ever-deepening collection of catalogue titles. Today, Pandora has a growing user base of more than 18 million registered listeners and national advertisers such as HP, Microsoft, Toyota, AT&T, Procter and Gamble, and Nike.