Apple Unveils iTunes Radio | Hacker News Reader

Apple Unveils iTunes Radio

techcrunch.com

55 pointsashbrahma39 comments

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.

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

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

Pandora as a standalone company is worthless. Whatever profits they make will be taken from them by the record companies. However, as part of another major internet advertising company (Facebook, Google, etc.) Pandora's product is interesting. That opens the door to audio retargeting ads, and other decent ad intelligence. So long as Pandora is an independent company, they will never make a profit, but they will always be an acquisition target, so that is why I don't short their stock.

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.

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

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.

Reliability is still the problem for me. On iPhone, I frequently find download speeds ridiculously slow (on WiFi and LTE), and sometimes songs won't load at all. On iTunes on Windows 7, I frequently have auth issues, where it will gray out all or most of my library and require me to locate the files locally in order to play them. For the latter, the only fix I've found is to sign in and out and/or reconnect iTunes Match.

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

Legally they are completely different things, different royalty rates.

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

I will be cancelling my Spotify subscription for this. 99% of the time I just listen to random stuff. Usually top list, or different genre radios.

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

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.

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

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

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.

yeah, that is nice. It still doesn't make one clearly better. Currently the best iRadio alternative would be to use Google Play for purchased music and Pandora for radio... and that would still be more expensive than iTunes Match. iTunes has more exclusive artists than Google Play and 256kbps AAC is better quality than 320kbps MP3 and requires less bandwidth.

Ever used genius playlists? They leave everything else I have tried in the dust. I'm listing to some random BS off spotify right now, and if there is a link between the song I hit radio on, and this one, damned if I know what it is. I tried making a playlist off a kids song for the toddler the other day, and came back 10 mins later to find her listening to German opera. In not sure who was more confused.

I wonder how classical music compares to pop songs of today in terms of educational and musical value. Is there even a way to measure this?

Unsure - and (as you may be indicating), not all pop music is equal. Can you rightly compare the Beatles to Bieber?

I have pondered this - and every time I come back to the Beatles. Pop music in its day, still great music now. I shudder imaging someone saying this about Beiber et al.

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.

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

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.

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/

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

Ah, I keep forgetting those still exist.

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).

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

This is a Pandora-like service. You don't get to pick the songs played, just the artist/genre/song that the streaming service's playlist will use as a reference point.

I liked the concept when Pandora was new, but it seems somewhat out dated in a world of Spotify and Rdio which has radio features as a subset of a product that allows more user choice alongside passive discovery. A Pandora clone makes it seem like the record companies' interests were put ahead of the users' by Apple.

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.

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.

This is a great example of the innovator's dilemma.

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.

Pretty sure you are using Radio Stations, not iTunes Radio. That feature has been around for a very long time.

Oops..guess I found something old that I thought was new..sorry HN folks, my bad :(

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

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

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