Spotify vs. Pandora vs. Songza
FREE MUSIC STREAMING SERVICES RESEARCH
There are a lot of free music streaming services out there, and they each have their unique pros and cons. Jerllin and I decided to summarize some of the popular services for free music streaming on mobile devices and PC’s which are Spotify, Pandora and Songza. And we are going to more focus on researching user experience on their websites/web-player.
SPOTIFY
1. Homepage
Once you go to Spotify website, you can see the beautiful parallax scrolling page which is very intuitive and easy to navigate. And they are showing the difference clearly between free service and paid one.
2. Web Player
When you click the 'go to web player' button, they ask you to sign up or log in. And you can see how it's made simple and easy to sign up. Once you logged in, you can see the huge banner ads on the top, with nice and clean overview page, which suggests you playlist that you can listen to at that time. For example, if you go this site at night, the title of the menu goes like "Take your night to the next level". I especially like this one, because it feels like the service is really care about me. And you can choose music by genres & moods which nicely offered as grid menu with nice icons in it. So you can see all menus at once even though you don't click all the menu.
Searching navigation is really easy as well. Once you enter a keyword, the results is listed sorting by artist, album and etc. Radio station looks really simple too. They emphasize the new station to promote and offers simple tags that sorted by genre. My library is also listed very clearly and the intuitive player comes up when you play a song.
And I was struggling with finding how to logout and they hide it at the bottom of settings, which I think it’s very clever move. Overall, I couldn't find anything confuse me and it was really nice that they have consistency in every pages.
PANDORA
When I saw Pandora homepage for the first time, I thought that it looks simple to use. However, I had the most difficult time with Pandora to use it among 3 services. And the homepage, I think there is too much waste of space. And the type is too small to read.
The first thing I’m curious about was Music Genome Project. (Basically the purpose is to provide music-loving Web surfers with the ability to create free, personalized online radio stations that only play music the listener likes—even when it's music the listener has never heard before.) The page describe about the project but I think there is no one who will read this carefully. If it is really important for Pandora, they should introduce it more simple and clear way. Besides, I was struggling with getting out of this page. So I clicked Pandora logo to go to homepage.
As you can see they wants you to sign in, but I tried to enter to subpage without logging in. And I expected to be able to click the bold ‘music genre stations’ menu but I cannot click the main title(although the arrow turns into finger..), so I click today’s hits. And you can see the banner ads on the side and once you go to other pages the size of the banners keep changing which it very distracting. When you browse genre to create your own station, it is hard to look for something since the genre is listed too long and subdivided.
There are music Feed and My profile right next to playlist menu, those are minor function. So I think it should be placed other spot and replaced to browse genre stations. Another problematic thing is that when you search something, it plays a song right away once you got the result. they should let users make sure about the result and decide to play a song or not. My overall experience with Pandora was quite bad. I think they need to change the structure more intuitive and easy to navigate.
SONGZA
Songza is much more simple and easy to use than Pandora. it offers user experiences with activity-based navigation like Spotify. And they make daily news so that user can get an information about music everyday. I think it is really good strategy to make user keep visiting the site. Back to the homepage, I like the way that they suggests music in simple, nice way. Also, when you search a word, it shows the results very clearly.They make user browse music based on activities, genres, moods and decades while Spotify combined all thing into genre & mood. I think the way they categorized is better than Spotify. And the banner ads is not that distracting than other services. The one thing I’m still not sure about it, however, is the difference of displaying when login and logout. They should make clear differences if they want to make users keep coming in.
Overall, I think Spotify offers the best user experience among three of them with their huge music library and activity-based navigation and consistency. Songza is my second choice in terms of their simple navigation and non distracting ads and design. Meanwhile, Pandora is really difficult to use for new visitors. Despite of their effort for the big project, I think they don’t even meet the basic needs of the users. It has to be changed to offer better user experience.