

Apple Unveils iTunes Radio - ashbrahma
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/itunes-radio/

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pbreit
I was a holdout against subscription music for a long time but the time has
come (actually probably a year or 3 ago). I accidentally lost my 15,000 song
collection and was pleasantly surprised that I could still listen to it with
Match (in fact I liked that doing so did not take up any drive space). But I
still pretty much ever listen to my iTunes collection, instead just call up
(almost) anything on Spotify. Being able to access almost any track for the
cost of an album per month beats the heck out of pay-per-track/album.

Will be interesting to see if iRadio (and some of Apple's other things) make
it to Windows and Android. That's the only way to become Pandora-et. al.
killers.

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joezydeco
Pandora's stock ended up 2.5% today. Perhaps iTunes radio isn't as big a
threat as suspected?

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pbreit
Well, it went down 20% on the initial news a week ago.

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smackfu
Since it comes for free with iTunes Match, I suppose I will cancel Pandora if
this doesn't suck. But I don't have much faith in that... iTunes Match is
barely serviceable IMHO, and I'm mainly paying for it as a cloud backup of my
music.

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shinratdr
What's wrong with iTunes Match? It wasn't great at launch in terms of
reliability but I have no problems with it now.

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smackfu
On the desktop it is fine. On the iPhone, it's slow to play songs that aren't
local yet, and doesn't really work as seamlessly as I want. I know which songs
are downloaded and which are not, because they act differently.

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beggi
So weird not having support for individual songs. This might hurt Pandora but
this won't be touching Spotify's business.

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tunesmith
Legally they are completely different things, different royalty rates.

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beggi
Yeah I understand, it's just that I'm surprised they didn't make similar
contracts to Spotify.

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psbp
The functionality looks much worse than Google's Play music service, but it's
free, so there's that.

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craigyk
much worse? iTunes has 10X more functionality than the web-based Google Play
interface. For $25/year you get to match 25,000 songs to 256kbps AAC and you
get ad-free personal stations. Google play may give you individual tracks and
20,000 songs matched for $90-120 a year. They have their pros and cons, but I
don't think either is clearly "worse" than the other. Personally, since I
already use iTunes Match, iRadio is a way better choice for me.

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TillE
Google will host 20,000 uploaded songs for $0 per year.

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psbp
And it's also 320kbps. I think it will even preserve the format of the
uploaded file and just stream at 320.

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simon_weber
re:preserving format: it does not, unfortunately. Anything non-mp3 is
transcoded to 320kbs mp3, and the original copy is not stored.

Any metadata that doesn't fit into their system is also lost in the process.

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Kylekramer
So now Apple will have a pretty major ad platform in the near future. I just
wonder if it was their idea or a result of negotiations with the labels.

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zevyoura
iAds is already a significant ad platform, it's not clear to me that this one
will definitely eclipse it.

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timsaunders
Still think the Spotify model is a lot better in terms of sharing and finding
new music people are listening too.. Seems like I still have to pay for my
individual songs on iTunes, which I think is a dieing breed.

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JosephBrown
I don't know if this has been mentioned anywhere yet, but on Apple's iRadio
page, there are pictures of iPhones with colored edges.

[http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-
radio/](http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-radio/)

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38leinad
maybe a new ipod touch? does not have a speaker but only a camera at the usual
location.

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JosephBrown
Ah, I keep forgetting those still exist.

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joezydeco
The devices with colored edges also say "iPod" instead of the carrier (which
are now ____* in all new Apple stuff, probably to avoid showing carrier
favoritism).

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grecy
What compels me to actually "buy" any song now when I can just stream it on
"iRadio" for free?

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chollida1
If you are like me, then the answer is bandwidth. Alot of plans only have
500Megs per month of data. I'm looking at plans in Canada

If each song takes 5 Megs then I can stream 100 songs a month if I don't use
any additional bandwidth.

Additionally I can't listen to this music during my subway commute into work,
which is my primary music listening time.

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corry
Rdio lets you sync songs / albums locally onto your mobile device and then
doesn't require a connection to play them. Not sure if other services have
similar features.

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suyash
Just tried it on the new iTunes for OSX and it kind of sucks. Great collection
of Radio stations but you can't: 1\. Save any stations as your favorites. 2\.
Quality of audio is below par 3\. Station frequently looses signal and iTunes
has to rebuffer.

I don't see it replacing Pandora yet.

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achivetta
What? I'm pretty sure it's not available until the fall.

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andrewmunsell
On iOS 7 (beta), it should be available now.

