The structure of the concert series goes hand in hand with the structure of Pandora itself.

In Pandora radio, you get customized, personalized “stations” based around music you already like and your own voting on songs (thumbs up, thumbs down). Ideally, you end up with stations playing tons of music that you like and helping you discover new music within the same range of taste as what you already like.

The concert series does the same thing, but for a larger area, and live. Pandora analyzes the preferences and voting patterns of subscribers in a given locality (e.g. Portland), then selects a band to play that area.

The show is at the Bowery Ballroom. Doors open at 8:00 PM, show starts at 9:00 PM. The shows are free and by invitation. A few tickets are available at the door starting at 7:00 PM, but given the venue, they will likely go fast.

Portugal. The Man – “Got It All”

Dawes – “A Little Bit of Everything”

When Spotify first rolled out, I was excited. I got an invite, downloaded it, and went full-bore with a Premium subscription so I could go mobile.

I use Spotify all the time. I have a grandfathered-in unlimited data plan on AT&T, so I play the thing while driving, all over the house, etc.

People who have Spotify love Spotify. Detractors seem to always mention one thing: It isn’t Pandora.

Of course, what is awesome about Pandora, is that you get to discover new music. You start with something you already like. You listen to recommendations and you tweak as you go (thumbs-up, thumbs-down). Soon, you have a whole station of stuff you like, and you’re discovering new songs in your taste range.

Spotify did not have this. There were third-party sites that kinda-sorta approximated it, but it was certainly not mobile.

Until now.

Spotify recently opened its API for developers. The first to jump into the fray is an app called SpotON. SpotOn combines the Spotify and Echonest APIs for this project. SpotON is for Spotify Premium users and promises to offer you suggestions for new music based on what you are already listening to. Sound familiar?

Guess what has two thumbs and just downloaded SpotOn from the Apple App Store? Let’s fire it up. I should interject here that I will be intentionally testing this out in 3G, not on Wi-Fi. If you’re going to pay for Premium and go mobile, you need to know if this thing is up to the task.

Lately I’ve been playing lots of Cake, Lou Reed and Rush. Don’t ask me why. These things have a life of their own. Right off the bat, SpotON reads this activity and creates 3 “stations” to start me off. I also have the option of creating a new station. Let’s try the Cake station they pre-rolled for me.

After a couple of false starts (likely 3G issues), things are rolling. The Cake station pitched me They Might Be Giants, POTUSA, and Camper Van Beethoven. 90′s stuff. I can see where they are going with this.

The Rush channel, however, hit a snag. I ended up with a recent Pitbull tune, featuring David “Rush”. Hopefully there is more to this than a text string result. Thumbs down for bad result (though I do like the track) and see what’s next.

Spock’s Beard. Now we’re in line with the Rush-esque results I had hoped for.

The Lou Reed channel starts feeding me Iggy Pop.

I like the track and want to “star” it. SpotON offers me the chance to add the track to any existing Spotify Playlist I have previously created or to share on Facebook.

But, there is no choice to simply star it, nor to create a new playlist. That’s a problem for me. I commonly star Spotify tracks for later listening to see if they grow on me. I have my “starred” tracks set to sync offline so I don’t need an Internet connection to play them.

Let’s hope that the absence of starring capability changes soon.

Next offer from this “Lou Reed” channel: David Bowie. Good deal.

Let’s try to create a whole new station.

There’s an option to choose from my own top artists, expanding the list of the first three that what we have already done. Nice.

I can also browse the top 100 artists on Spotify. And, of course, search for something else entirely. Let’s do a search for “Florence + the Machine”.

The artist is found. I click on it to create a station. Similar artists are searched. A Florence tune starts things off: “What the Water Gave Me”. Nice. Let’s thumb it up and see what else we get.

Ah, Bat For Lashes. Makes sense. Thumbs up. Next… PJ Harvey. So far, so good. And then… Lykke Li. I am happy.

The interface looks sweet. No apparent broken stuff. The only things that I feel are missing are the aforementioned inability to “star” tracks and the inability to create new playlists. Other than that, looks like we have a winner.

I’m looking forward to seeing updates on this app and also seeing others take advantage of the Spotify API.

Pandora used CES as an excuse to boast their ridiculous number of registered users and new partnerships that further cement them as a major player in the Internet radio business.

First up, Pandora declared that they have now moved up to more than 125 million registered users. This is most likely due to the fact that Pandora is now deployed on more than 450 consumer electronic devices, up from 200 products the same time last year.

They announced that the average listener time has increased to 18 hours a month. Considering that more and more people listen to Pandora on their smartphones, that’s a lot of data and money for the mobile providers.

As a final boast that is sure to make Pandora the envy of Internet radio companies everywhere, they announced that they now own 68% of the market share. At least they did in November according to Triton Digital.

Pandora is also now in partnerships with 23 automotive companies. Some of those include Acura, Kia and Audiovox, with the last one being an aftermarket company. They also announced a partnership with Dish Network for their new set-top box and DVR.

Jessica Steel, EVP of business and corporate development for Pandora said, “The car is one of the most popular venues for radio listening and incorporating Pandora into the native environment of automobile dashboards makes listening to personalized internet radio as easy and natural as listening to traditional radio.”

Do you contribute to Pandora’s 125 million users? Or do you prefer one of the other providers? Sound off in the comments.

Some are already billing it as a Pandora killer. If you ask me, Pandora already had some pretty stiff competition. The unlimited skips part will surely entice plenty of people, however.

“You can be the DJ and skip between stations and tracks, or choose a station and just go with the flow,” says Spotify’s Andres Sehr. “If you like what you hear, you can save the song to a playlist or play it again on demand.”

To start a new station, simply click “start artist radio,” which you can find at the top of any artist page. You can also drag a track to “Radio” in the sidebar to create one.

Here’s what others are saying about it:

Pandora recently rolled out its own new version, but the way things are shaping up, I think we’re going to see the company up its game.

Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio, another legitimate contender to Pandora, which offers basically the same functionality in addition to access to radio stations from around the U.S., recently extended its free ad-free service.

The new Spotify Radio should continue rolling out over the next few days, along with Spotify Apps.

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.

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.

 On TiVo, users can create a new free Pandora account, or sign-in with an existing Pandora accounts and access their current station on television. Users can access Pandora stations created on TiVo or any other platform where they listen to Pandora, including PCs, smartphones and other connected devices.

“The Pandora application brings additional music customization to the all-in-one TiVo box," said Jim Denney, VP and GM of Product Marketing for TiVo.

"With Pandora now available on TiVo Premiere, we offer customers even more options when it comes to music including personalized on-demand radio, audio podcasts, music videos, music from your PC, and more through the TV and with just one remote."

Pandora joins TiVo’s current musical lineup of Rhapsody, Live365, Music Choice and songs connected from a PC or Mac music library.

"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.