At the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, Apple showed the world what their future music streaming service would look like. Expected to launch in the fall, iTunes Radio will put the makers of iTunes in direct competition with, streaming companies Pandora and Spotify, and fellow tech giant Google‘s Play Music All Access, which launched just four weeks ago.
The reports had been trickling in over the last couple of months as one by one, the big record labels got on board. First Universal, then Warner, and now, with last Friday’s news that Sony was signed up, we were left with no doubt that such a launch was imminient.
iTunes Radio features streaming radio stations based on artist and genre, and allows you to customize your own. The service will fine-tune your preferences the more you use it, similar to Apple’s Genius software, and you can further improve it with a ‘thumbs up’ on songs you enjoy and ‘Play More Like This’ or ‘Never Play This Song’ options. The standout difference from the Genius software is that iTunes Radio will reach across the entire iTunes catalog; somewhere around 26 million tracks.
The streaming service will initially be available in the U.S. only, but you can use it on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, PC, and Apple TV. All stations and history are stored in iCloud, so you share tastes and can pick up listening where you last left it across all your devices. Instead of hearing the occassional ad, you can shoose to listen ad-free when you subscribe to iTunes Match. iTunes Match stores all your music in iCloud — even songs you’ve imported from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. So combining that with iTunes Radio means that you can use your entire music collection to make your stations even more personalized.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services said, “iTunes Radio is an incredible way to listen to personalized radio stations which have been created just for you. It’s the music you love most and the music you’re going to love, and you can easily buy it from the iTunes Store with just one click.”
While Apple didn’t invent the mp3 player, or downloading, the iPod and iTunes helped changed the digital music game ten years ago. iTunes Radio is, again, is not something brand new – most of us have been streaming music for years via services such as Spotify, Pandora and the like. These companies have already made themselves into digital music giants, and to pull customers away from them, Apple must step their streaming game up. Still, iTunes Radio looks great and is easy to use, and if nothing else, it keeps music consumers in their space, rather than shifting between two sources for streaming and downloading. That will help maintain iTunes sales until they can find a way to capture the imagination of their rivals’ customers.
Will Apple once again blow the competition out of the water? Probably not just yet. Will it drive more sales to the iTunes store? Very likely. And that’s what Apple do well; cross-sell to mass markets.
by Lee Jarvis.
Follow Lee on Twitter @leejarvis and get music jobs updates from @usmusicjobs
