Pandora wants to help artists connect with their fans

When every music-streaming service offers roughly the same content for roughly the same price, it can be hard for one service to differentiate itself from the competition. One of the ways Spotify is doing this is by expanding its messaging and social features, which not only strengthens the sense of community within the service, it makes it easier for music to be recommended and shared as well. As one of Spotify’s oldest competitors, it’s only natural for Pandora to expand its own such features in order to compete, which is why the company has launched a new service called AMPcast, which allows artists to connect with their fans through custom audio messages.

While Spotify is acquiring startups expand its messaging and social features, Pandora is also raising its game in the artist-to-fan communications sphere for musicians to better target Pandora’s 80 million users. Today, the music streaming company is launching a service called AMPcast — a service to let musicians “speak to their fans” by way of audio messages that they can record quickly on their mobile phones and post to run in conjunction with their music streams. The new feature comes at an interesting time. Just yesterday we wrote about a new service called Superphone. Coded by musician Ryan Leslie, it’s a super light version of an artist’s communication tool that uses SMS and user’s phone numbers to send direct messages to fans. It includes features like geo-targeting and the ability to segment based on previous actions like what music or merchandise a user buys. The emergence of Superphone, to me, is a sign of how artists are not just in need of more tools to market themselves in the cut-throat, thin margin world of digital music — but also of how some are looking to take matters into their own hands. The new feature launch is also coming up ahead of Pandora’s much anticipated integration and future roadmap in the wake of its acquisition of Rdio. It looks like AMPcast is next generation product of Artist Audio Messages, which Pandora founder Tim Westergren first launched a year ago and has had 152 million messages heard to date.