They must want to keep their momentum in competing with Pandora going strong.

The new iHeartRadio launched in September. It used be basically a way to listen to radio stations from around the country, and that was pretty nice on its own, but the new version keeps that functionality and adds a Pandora-like feature that lets users create their own stations based on songs or artists that they like. So far, these custom stations have not had ads, and users like that, so extending the no-ad time should be pretty good for continuing to win over new users who are tired of the ads on the free version of Pandora.

A Clear Channel spokesperson tells WebProNews they’re “beginning to work with advertisers to eventually integrate commercials into the service in a way that delivers real value to them while being acceptable to listeners.”

“The New iHeartRadio has exceeded our expectations – and more importantly, those of our fans – since it launched in September at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas. It offers our listeners everything they want from a digital radio service in one completely integrated, free experience,” said Brian Lakamp, President of Clear Channel Digital. “Because Custom Stations are only a feature of the New iHeartRadio, we have the luxury of being able to extend our commercial-free Custom Stations till April 1, 2012.”

Clear Channels notes that iHeartRadio is consistently in the top 10 downloads of free music apps for the iPhone and in the top five for Android.

It logs 65 million listening hours a month, and the mobile apps have been downloaded 44 million times. The iHeartRadio is currently available at iHeart.com and on iOS and Android.

WebProNews spoke with Pandora CTO and Head of Product Tom Conrad about the new version. It looks like they moved up their launch date from what he told us, but you can watch the interview here:

Here are the features as they laid out in the announcement:

Simplified Station Creation – Enhanced auto-complete choices and personalized suggestions make creating new stations and discovering new music or comedy more intuitive and personal.

Unlimited listening – We’ve removed the 40 hours listening cap – you can now listen as much as you want for free.

Maybe the new design will keep people who are flocking to other services like Last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Turntable.fm, Rhapsody, etc. The online music space isn’t getting any easier to compete in. Let’s not forget things like Amazon, iCloud, Google Music, and mSpot either.

He told us that radio is currently undergoing a shift as people are transitioning from traditional radio with DJs picking songs, to Internet radio options with personalized listening experiences.

Do you find yourself listening more to traditional radio or Internet radio? Let us know.

As the leader in the music streaming space, Pandora believes that it is playing a key role in this shift since it strives to offer users a valuable radio experience.

“We like to set the challenge for ourselves to ensure that Pandora is the future of radio,” said Conrad.

As part of Pandora’s ambitious effort, the company is currently revamping its service to provide a faster, easier, and more social experience for users. Conrad told us that the company started this mission around a year ago with these very goals in mind.

To make the service faster, Pandora switched from Flash to HTML5. Conrad told us that this change has made a significant difference in the performance of the site.

“For the first time, I think, Pandora feels really native to the Web,” he said. “It’s a subtle detail, but it underlies the whole new experience.”

For an easier user experience, Conrad explained that he wanted the site to operate with the same ease and simplicity that their mobile apps did. As a result, the “New Pandora” includes better search functions, improved user control, more information about the music and the artists, among other features.

The revamp also integrates social networking capabilities. Although user profiles have existed for some time, they were not widely utilized. Now, they become extremely relevant since they can be used to see a friend’s recent activity. This activity will also appear in the new Music Feed stream, which will allow users to discover new music and share it.

“We’ve been incredibly focused on solving the problem of how to create a really personalized music experience,” said Conrad. “It’s entirely about you when you come to Pandora.”

Although the “New Pandora” is only available to paid users at this time, it will be rolled out all users over next few weeks.

To continue to personalize its service, Pandora also released 12 new stations that are specifically designed for users when they workout. The stations range from 80′s Cardio to Pop Fitness to Classic Rock Power Workout, and users can further personalize each station by voting songs up or down.

While some of these features are a result of what users attempt to do on Pandora, Conrad told us that the company also has a vision for the future of radio and incorporates features based upon this vision.

“We have to lead the market,” he said. “We have to create products that do things that people didn’t even know they wanted.”

He went on to say that, even with all the hype around Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio service and Spotify, the revamp and Pandora’s continued vision would help the company maintain its leadership position. He cites Spotify’s CEO labeling Spotify as the future of record stores and Pandora as the future of radio, which he thinks is a “perfect distinction.”

“We’re nice complements to one another, and there is certainly room in the market for both,” said Conrad.

As for Clear Channel, he believes that its iHeartRadio service is further validation that the future of radio is personalized.

Pandora had its initial public offering today, opening on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “P”. The company priced about 14.76 million shares of common stock at $16 per share, with a total of about 6 million shares are being offered by Pandora, and 8.7 million shares by selling stockholders.

Pandora also granted underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 2.2 million shares to cover over-allotments.Here’s a glimpse of what the stock is doing at the time of this writing, via Google Finance:

Obviously Pandora has had a big day, but they haven’t been too busy not to wish Ice Cube a happy birthday:

And in the end, that’s what really matters.

Pandora has a market cap of 2.87 Billion.

It will also instantly select Internet radio stations it thinks you’ll like, based on music genres or your own artist searches. CEO Daren Tsui tells WebProNews, “We keep track of songs played by the radio stations we’ve aggregated. We use this data to make our recommendations.  For example, you are listening to Lady Gaga using our player and you click on the radio button.  We would give you a list of stations starting with our Personal Radio (like Pandora) using Lady Gaga as the seed.”

“The rest of the list is a combination of our commercial free radio stations and Internet radio stations that have played Lady Gaga recently,” he continues. ”The more the station played Lady Gaga recently, the higher the station will be ranked on the recommendation list.”

As far as finding new artists and music to listent to goes, he says, “It really depends on what the radio stations are playing.  As we aggregate more Internet stations, I would expect our hit rate to keep increasing even with obscure music and artists.”

The service is not ad supported. “We make money when users sign up to our premium tier,” he says.

mSpot gives the following bullet points for how mSpot with Radio Spotter dffers from existing music services:

• Unlike Pandora and Slacker; Play all of your own music alongside new music
• that is discovered on real radio stations: Your own music collection is the
  basis of all the new music you find and listen to.
• Unlike iTunes; Store your music collection in the cloud so that you can always
• access it, wherever you are. Your music is connected to the Internet, so you
• can match your preferences to hundreds of Internet radio stations to discover
  and play new music for free.
• Unlike subscription services like Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio; Listening is free.
• Match the music you already love with music playing on radio stations all over
  the Internet.
• Unlike Cloud storage services like Amazon or Google; Listening is not limited
• to your own music, or music for purchase; your music now connects you to
  hundreds of radio stations.

Initially, the service is available for Android. It’s in the Android Market. It will be coming to the iPhone, Mac, PC, and other devices later this year.

mSpot has to find ways to separate itself from the growing competition, which is coming from some big players Amazon, Google, and maybe even Facebook, not to mention the other music-dedicated companies out there like those mentioned above and others. This is a great way to do that, at least for now.

Those of you familiar with the two bands will get the joke. Those of you who aren’t, don’t feel left out – the joke sucks.

But in all seriousness, Pandora’s like-recommendation engine has kept many a listener from recycling all the old stuff that they’re comfortable with. And now, Pandora is announcing that they are adding comedy to their personalized channel options.

Now available for your listening pleasure are over 10,000 clips from more than 700 comedians – with more being added as we speak. Adding comedy to the personalized channel mix had to be a long, but sometimes enjoyable process for the folks at Pandora. Here’s what they have to say about it on the Pandora blog:

Adding comedians to the mix has been one of the top requests from our listeners, so we’ve taken the same approach to comedy as we have to music: carefully and deliberately analyzing comedic “bits” across a very large number of attributes to capture the style, delivery and content of each performance. It’s been a very fun experience, taking what we’ve learned in music and applying it to a whole new category. Now, instead of talking about “minor keys,” “falsetto,” and “extensive vamping,” our comedy-analysts capture “odd juxtaposition” (A horse walks into a bar…), “misdirection” and “spoonerisms” (a well-boiled icicle, instead of a well-oiled bicycle)…

So, just like music, listeners can pick a starting point whether that be a specific comedian, genre, or specific joke. Young comedians will be linked to old greats like Cosby, Carlin and Pryor. It could really help young comedy lovers discover the people who influenced their current favorites.

Plus, this might in fact be the greatest thing to ever happen to road trips in the history of ever.

“It’ll be interesting when I find out who I’m paired up with,” said comedian Adam Carolla, whose material will be included in the service to the NYT. “I’m sure at some point someone will be insulted. There may be a lot of unintended comedy.”

The only shocking thing for me so far is that they were able to create a set of comedy “like” Louis C.K. – since he is the funniest person on the face of the planet. Since there aren’t multiple funniest persons on the planet, this seems odd to me. Go check him out now.

"Our listeners have been telling us for a while that they’d like an easy way to start a station from popular genres with the option to personalize the station from there," says Senior Music Curator Michael Zapruder. "We wanted to find a uniquely Pandora way to address this consumer need so we created a number of genre stations that are carefully seeded with relevant songs and constantly refreshed with new releases."

This should indeed make Pandora a more useful tool for music discoverability. It should make for a good way to find unknown artists within a given genre that may or may not be considered similar to an artist a user already likes. There is a reason this feature has been heavily requested.

The stations include genres like:

- Today’s Hits
- Today’s Adult Hits
- Today’s Hip Hop and R&B Hits
- 80′s Pop
- Today’s Country
- Classic Rock
- Today’s Hip Hop and Pop Hits
- Smooth Jazz
- Today’s R&B and Old School
- Club/Dance
- Today’s Alternative
- Love Songs

There are over 100 micro-genre stations that users can choose from.

Last month, Pandora announced that it had surpassed its 60 million-user milestone. Recent integration with Facebook has attracted some more interest to the site. It was a launch partner for Facebook’s Open Graph. Mobile apps will no doubt continue to fuel growth as well.

"We thought it was important to make this adjustment to better reflect the realities of the internet today," says Pandora Founder Tim Westergren. "If you’re a returning listener you’ve probably already seen a reminder about your Pandora profile page, something we’ve offered since we launched."

"This reminder provides you with the immediate opportunity to see your profile, make it public, private, or learn more," he adds.

New users will see similar messages, and they’re also sending out emails to users who listen to Pandora exclusively on mobile devices. They’ll have to sign in on a computer to adjust their privacy settings.

All profile pages on Pandora now have a prominent privacy settings link. If you’re ashamed of what you listen to, go set your profile to private.

Pandora recently announced that it had surpassed 60 million users.

"Essentially, we’re mapping brand preferences to peoples’ musical tastes, allowing advertisers to identify their appropriate artist subsets and target the audiences that are listening to, reading or watching content about those exact artists," a Jango Representative told me. He then gave me the following example based on internal testing:

Ads that ran against the unique artist subset for Dodge Truck received a 273% higher click-through rate than ads that ran against the average artist. For Armani Exchange, the difference was +82% and for Gevalia Coffee it was +147%. Each brand had a completely different subset of artists – some expected, others somewhat unexpected. Dodge not only performed well with Keith Urban – but also Justin Timberlake. Armani Exchange was not just favored by fans of Coldplay – but also fans of John Mayer; Gevalia Coffee shared a strong affinity with Bruce Springsteen – but an even stronger one with Leona Lewis.

"Up until now, there wasn’t any smart way for advertisers to target user segments based on music taste," says Jango CEO Dan Kaufman. "Now, for just $10,000, advertisers can effectively map their brand affinity to music taste – and then reach their audience on a giant scale for very low CPM’s."

"With the Jango Music Network, we can continuously re-target the users that respond better to a certain brand and constantly keep improving our advertisers’ campaign performance,” he explains.

The Jango Music Network as it is called, represents the inventory of hundreds of "high-engagement" music sites reaching over 30 million unique monthly visitors just in the US – more than MySpace Music, Yahoo Music, and AOL Music.

Coinciding with the launch of the Jango Music Network, Jango.com is moving out of beta and into public release. The company says Jango.com is the eighth largest music site in the country (just a year after launching) based on comScore pageview numbers from December.

CBS Radio is a huge operator, and CBS Radio will power Launchcast starting early next year.  A new CBS Radio player will be offered through the Yahoo Music site, and CBS Radio is even scheduled to take over advertising sales.

 David Goodman

Yahoo, in return, will see its name put in front of much a larger audience, since CBS Radio should bring about 150 stations to the table.  Yahoo should continue to program its own music channels, as well, so there’s little danger of users getting scared off by new formats.

As for how outside companies are supposed to feel about the development, David Goodman, CBS Radio’s president of digital media and integrated marketing, pointed out in a statement, "Partnering with Yahoo! ensures advertisers will be able to reach the greatest possible audience as we leverage our local and national sales force, as well as TargetSpot, to create distinctive campaigns and one of a kind integrated opportunities."

It sounds like a no-lose situation for just about everybody.  Shares of CBS stock, by the way, rose 14.2 percent today perhaps thanks to this and several other news items.