Sprint Offers Pandora Personalised Radio Stream on Mobile Phones

American mobile operator Sprint announced another agreement to eiden its mobile content offering:

In their first mobile deal, Pandora, a personalized online music service provider, is offering to stream radio stations on a number of Sprint handsets via pre-installed or downloaded software. Pandora, which enables its 6.5 million online subscribers to enter a favorite song or artist and listen to streaming content with the same sound and style, will offer the same service to Sprint's mobile customers.

To download the client, take your Sprint phone browser to Pandora.com and you will be prompted to download it. This offer is free for 30 days. After that you must have a Pandora premium account, which costs $3/month with a Sprint data plan (this also removes ads from Pandora.com when you listen there). The service will work initially on five phone models but will expand to all high-speed data phones sold by Sprint by the end of June.

Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project, a proprietary system that employs musicians to analyze songs one at a time, identifying musical qualities like melody, harmony, rhythm, arrangement, lyrics and vocals. Information about each current song, like title, artist and album, is displayed on the phone's color screen, and Sprint subscribers may scroll backwards to see the same data for recently played songs. Users may also rate songs to adjust Pandora's programming, pause and skip songs. In addition, Sprint subscribers may bookmark songs, saving title and artist for subsequent purchase at the Sprint Music Store. The Sprint service will integrate with Pandora's online service, enabling users to save up to 100 stations per account. Sprint customers can also create new stations directly on their phones.

[via Press release]

Sprint is the first mobile operator to offer Pandora, it would be interesting to see how other mobile operators will follow...