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Pandora will use its music discovery skills to recommend podcasts

It's working on a podcast version of its Music Genome Project.

For years, Pandora has been breaking down songs into all sorts of different characteristics in order to personalize listening experiences to each user, and now it's applying that treatment to podcasts. Pandora CEO Roger Lynch said earlier this year that he wanted to develop a podcast version of the company's Music Genome Project and he recently shared some details about that work on The Verge's Converge podcast.

Lynch told The Verge's Casey Newton that while Pandora created personalized music discovery, there currently isn't a similar service for podcasts. "You might look at a chart, or you might see what your friends are [listening to]. There's nothing personalized about that," said Lynch. "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 said that currently, there's a lot of work being put into the project behind the scenes and Pandora is aiming to launch it by the end of the year.