Pandora Now highlights trending music as a playlist and SiriusXM station

It's been several months since SiriusXM purchased Pandora for $3.5 billion, and now we're finally getting a glimpse of how the satellite radio company plans to use its new toy. SiriusXM and Pandora announced Pandora Now, a new feature that will highlight popular and trending music for listeners on both platforms. Available starting today, Pandora Now will have a dedicated channel on SiriusXM for subscribers. Pandora Premium members will get to listen to Pandora Now as an interactive station, complete with song skippings and thumbs up and down ratings, or as a curated playlist.

The companies were pretty vague as to how Pandora Now will work. It will apparently use a mix of Pandora user ratings and SiriusXM curation tools to determine what will be played on the station. Pandora Now will aim to play music across all genres including pop, hip hop, R&B, dance and Latin. Obviously, the mix will wind up being a bit different for listeners using the interactive station on Pandora rather than those listening to the curated playlist or radio version. The feature appears to be SiriusXM's first attempt to make good on its promise to use Pandora's music discovery tools to create new stations.

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