For the longest time music streaming applications, most of them at least, have been about listening to music. These days, streaming music services and their application counterparts have expanded and have increasingly become more social with not only ways to interact with other users, but ways to interact with artists. The same is true for the reverse, as artists have ways to interact with the fans of their music as well. With Pandora, one of the longest running streaming music apps around on Android as well as other platforms, there is a newly launched application specifically for artists that will allow them to reach fans in a whole new way.
The app is called AMPcast and is a way for musicians who participate in Pandora’s Artist Marketing Platform to literally give them a voice and speak to their fans. With AMPcast, artists can record messages and then insert them into the music streams of listeners, but only if those listeners have liked that artist and given them a thumbs up. Since this is an app that allows this functionality, artists will be able to do this while out and about from their smartphones or tablets, making it even easier to either respond to fans or promote specific things.
In addition to the many available uses that music artists will now have thanks to AMPcast, the app will also give them the capability to insert clickable links for any sort of purpose like buying or pre-ordering a new or upcoming album. As stated above, these messages will only be inserted into your streams if you have given the thumbs up to a particular artists or if you have created a station using them as a starting point. It’s also possible to opt out of these messages if you wish, and if you still want to receive them but know you won’t always want to hear them, you can also skip listening and there is no limit to how many times you can skip artists messages like there are with song skips. At the moment messages will reach essentially anyone based on the above-mentioned criteria, but Pandora may end up introducing a location-based element so that messages from artists will only reach people in a certain area if it has to do with that particular city. Plans to make AMPcast available to any artist that is enrolled with the AMP program are in the works, while Pandora has kept things small and limited to just a handful of certain artists while they gather data on the success of the app.