Over the past few days, Spotify has launched its newly-revamped radio feature, similar to the popular streaming radio station, Pandora. In fact, it’s almost exactly like Pandora’s music genome. With Spotify’s former radio application, all you had to do was click on the ‘artist radio’ tab and then you’d have your own station. However, it would not allow you to save it. Now, it is new and improved. Lets it break it down, one feature at a time.

The new Spotify service allows you to drag ANY track in your library (which I love) into the ‘radio’ tab on the desktop application. Spotify will then create a radio station of similar music. You now have the option of saving the station as well. The most alluring of all the new features, is that the user will now have unlimited skipping and unlimited stations. Pandora only allows the user to create 100 stations and you are only allowed to skip a certain number of songs per hour. Even on the paid subscription service for Pandora, you still can only skip a certain number of songs per hour. This is a big deal for many users; I know it is for me as well. Spotify’s unlimited skip feature is available for all levels of the service; free, unlimited and premium which ups the ante for Pandora users.

There has been some chatter in the blogosphere about how the new Spotify radio lacks the thumbs up or down feature that Pandora offers when you don’t like a song. But I’m guessing the folks over at Spotify are hoping the unlimited skips will counter that issue. Perhaps that will be the next feature they add to try and compete even more with Pandora. Only time will tell. But for now, Pandora is the reigning champion, in my opinion. Everyone keeps trying to compete with them and so far they haven’t been beat. Not to mention that here at the Radio Agency, we are also fans of the popular streaming station. We use Pandora to advertise for a good many of our clients. Let us know if you’d like to try it out and maybe you’ll become a fan, too.

Mallorie McRea is Traffic Manager at The Radio Agency. Please follow The Radio Agency’s Blog “Sounding Board” by subscribing to the RSS link above. Visit our website TheRadioAgency.com