Pandora expands its music-and-podcasts product Pandora Stories with help from SiriusXM’s guests

[NelsonG]

Pandora’s integration with new owner SiriusXM continues today, as the music streaming service will now benefit from the numerous SiriusXM guests and artists who come through its New York studios on a regular basis. Now, those guests’ interviews will contribute to Pandora Stories — the recently launched product that combines music and podcasts in a new format.

Launched in February, the idea behind Pandora Stories is to allow music listeners hear from their favorite artists as they play their music. For example, the artist might talk about the song’s back story, or what inspired them to write it. These are the sorts of insights that might otherwise be covered by an interview with an artist on a podcast program, but typically the podcast would then only play a clip from the song. In Pandora Stories, however, the storytelling is interspersed with full tracks.

The product launched with just over a half-dozen artists’ stories and has continued to grow its lineup. To date, Pandora Stories has featured music-enhanced stories from John Legend, Rob Thomas, 2 Chainz, Lauren Alaina, Daddy Yankee, Perry Farrell, and several others.

Now, Pandora is adding to that lineup with 15 new stories from SiriusXM guests. This includes big names like Adele, Lady Gaga, Blake Shelton, P!nk, Twenty One Pilots, Queen, Fall Out Boy, Stevie Nicks, J. Cole, Mariah Carey, Darius Rucker, Mumford and Sons, Phil Collins, and more.

SiriusXM has been quick to leverage its $3.5 billion acquisition of Pandora to benefit both businesses in recent months. Already, the company had rolled out talk show programming from SiriusXM as podcasts and Pandora, and launched a music station powered by listener data, Pandora NOW, across both services.

In addition to helping Pandora listeners get a taste of SiriusXM’s content, Pandora Stories also helps the music streaming service better compete against rivals — particularly Spotify, which has begun heavily investing in podcasts this year, with acquisitions of exclusive content, podcast studios and software for podcast creation.

Unrelated to the expansion of Pandora Stories, the company also announced Pandora was now available to Waze users on iOS, following the service’s launch on the navigation app on Android back in October. The integration here goes both ways — you can control Pandora in Waze, as well as see your Waze navigation in the Pandora app.

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