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When R&B singer Jill Scott started promoting the third single from her 2015 album earlier this year, Pandora Media Inc. let her put the song, "Can't Wait," into heavier-than-normal rotation on its internet radio service. But her fans didn't seem to like it, with only 40% giving it a thumbs-up.

The problem, according to Bryan Calhoun, the digital strategist for her management firm: "People weren't familiar with it."

But after Ms. Scott inserted an audio message to introduce the song in which she said, "I hope you love this song as much as I loved making it," 70% of fans started thumbing up the track, in turn prompting Pandora's system to play the song for a wider swath of listeners.

After letting some artists test such messages and similar marketing tools over the past few years, Pandora is now making a new tool kit available to any artist or label that could help solve one of the biggest conundrums of releasing music in the digital age: fans tend to prefer music they've heard before, and online services make it easier than ever to skip the unfamiliar. FM radio stations have long established familiarity by repeatedly bombarding listeners with a small number of songs. But digital services that allow users to choose, skip or thumb up and down their music don't offer the same ability to create hits.

Now, though, artists and labels who use Pandora's two-year-old "Amp" platform can record audio messages on their smartphones asking their fans to give new songs a chance, while instructing the service to play a certain song more often for a given period. The automated system also prompts artists to take these and other actions based on how listeners are responding to their music.

"Data is only useful if it's actionable," said Sara Clemens, Pandora's chief operating officer.

The new promotional tools are rolling out on the heels of Pandora's first direct-licensing deals with the major record labels in its nearly 17-year history. Pandora struck the deals in order to launch an on-demand, $10-a-month subscription offering—due out by year's end—that would compete with services such as Spotify AB, Apple Inc.'s Apple Music and the new Amazon Music Unlimited. Until this year, Pandora's relations with the major labels had been chilly as it used government-mandated licenses to play its 2 million-track catalog at federally set rates for its nearly 80 million free listeners. The listeners can create custom "stations" based on a song, artist, mood or genre but can't control which songs they hear.

Faced with stagnating listener growth in the countries where it operates—the U.S., Australia and New Zealand—the company this past summer opted to join with the big record companies in order to expand its offerings, launching an enhanced ad-free tier called "Pandora Plus" last month while eyeing international expansion down the road. Pandora's executives are hoping that the more aggressively artists and their labels use Pandora as a marketing tool, the more fans will engage with the service as well.

"It's a two-sided marketplace," said Pandora Chief Executive Tim Westergren in an interview earlier this year.

While Spotify and Apple Music also allow acts to post messages for their fans, artists can potentially reach a much bigger U.S. audience through Pandora, which has about four times the number of users than the 18.3 million paying music subscribers in the U.S. as of the first half of this year.

Pandora can also help artists plan and promote concerts at venues that have contracts with Ticketfly, the ticketing company that Pandora acquired last year. Artists can route tours through areas where their listeners are concentrated, and then announce the shows and sell tickets directly to those listeners through the platform.

Ticketfly, though, is still tiny compared with Live Nation Entertainment Inc.'s Ticketmaster, and artists playing Ticketmaster-contracted venues can't sell tickets directly through Pandora's site.

Having pushed out more than 5,400 audio messages to date, Pandora's Ms. Clemens said an average of 5% of the listeners who have heard messages announcing tour presales have clicked through to potentially buy tickets, while Pandora is regularly selling 10% to 30% of the inventory on tours that it promotes and tickets. About 55,000—or 10%—of the tickets to the Rolling Stones' 2015 "Zipcode" tour were purchased through Pandora in 24 hours, she said. A representative for the Rolling Stones declined to comment.

Giving labels more influence over which songs get pushed to listeners is a shift for Pandora, which has attracted many fans because of its algorithm that surfaces music based on the company's rigorous analysis of the musical properties of each song, along with every user's feedback to each tune. But Pandora said the songs being promoted will be clearly marked as "featured" and will be taken out of heavy rotation if enough listeners thumb them down. A spokeswoman said the company hadn't received any negative feedback about tracks it has promoted while testing the program so far.

Write to Hannah Karp at hannah.karp@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 17, 2016 06:55 ET (10:55 GMT)

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