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Pandora launches podcasts with personalized recommendations

Pandora launches podcasts with personalized recommendations

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Podcasts are now officially available on Pandora for all listeners as of today. The company announced the arrival in a blog post, saying it has hundreds of podcasts with over 100,000 episodes across genres like true crime, technology, music, and more.

Now in the Pandora app, there will be a new tab called “Recommended Podcasts For You,” and users can discover new podcasts throughout the app. For now, it looks like Pandora is launching with fan favorites like This American Life and Reply All, but anyone with a podcast who wants to be considered for inclusion can apply via a form that Pandora has supplied.

Pandora says it’s spent the last year working on its Podcast Genome Project in order to serve up personal recommendations for listeners, taking into account things like category as well as user interactions like thumbs, skips, collects, and plays. The Podcast Genome Project was announced earlier this year, and the company claims that it is sophisticated enough to identify a podcast’s topics on an individual episode level. This is, of course, an offshoot of Pandora’s Music Genome Project, which uses over 450 attributes to describe songs, along with complex algorithms to categorize and then suggest them to users.