Speaking to The Verge, Pandora’s CEO Roger Lynch said, “Pandora created personalized music discovery — that doesn’t exist in podcasts. You might look at a chart, you might see what your friends are [listening to]. There’s nothing personalized about that. We’re building for podcasts what we did for music, which is the podcast genome. So that we can present to you, as a Pandora listener, a personalized experience that will delight you just like we do with music.”
Lynch is hoping that by making podcast recommendations better and more accurate, it will help people discover more podcasts that are of interest to them, which in turn drives engagement and also revenue for the creators of podcasts. He also states that a lot of work still needs to be done before it is ready, although the company is aiming for a launch by the end of the year. Something that podcast listeners and Pandora users can look forward to.