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Comment by mercer | Hacker News Reader

I don't quite understand why they put so much emphasis on 24/7 radio. First, I knew few (younger) people who listen to radio. Second, it's technically not that impressive.

But most importantly: music is very divisive and tastes differ greatly. Apple has usually done a great job to keep their image as neutral as possible. There's a reason why the types of artists they generally associate with are rather inoffensive (Coldplay, The Beatles) or at worst found annoying (U2, or rather Bono).

So who gets excited about such a radio station?

(I just saw Drake get on stage, which actually illustrates this. He's neutral enough to not offend, but because it's music, I imagine a collective groan from pretty much all of my friends.)

To be clear, it's kind of a cute idea, but why emphasize it so much?

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I would kill to be able to go to the party Spotify will undoubtedly throw tonight.

There wasn't one thing in the entire presentation that was even intriguing, let alone in innovative. The reason I loved my iPod is because I didn't have to listen to the radio. And now Apple is making that the killer feature? RADIO? Like it's freaking 2002?

Other than that and artist communication (which I would maybe care about for one artist), Apple Music is Spotify. Their solution for finding what you want to listen to? "I like rock and alternative" (whatever that means). This has been done a dozen times, and rarely well.

Spotify has been iterating exact same concept for years and has all of my friends listening to it, as well as all of my playlists. People tell me Rdio is similar, but I've never had reason to use it. The only way Apple wins is if the power of something being the Apple default is truly that strong. Having Siri integration is literally the only thing that Apple has a leg up on any of the other music services on.

And then they call it "revolutionary" and throw it in a "ONE MORE THING!" slot? That's pretty bad. And I'm an Apple fanboy.

"The only way this wins is if the power of something being the Apple default is truly that strong."

For something like this, yeah, Apple default is probably that strong. Considering that it'll button right into all of their hardware (laptop, iPad, iPhone), I could see it being a fairly significant thing for them. It's one less app to have to use, one less payment interface to deal with, and integrate with whatever music the user already has.

Not to mention that Apple probably has a lot more clout in the bargaining arena with the record labels than Spotify does, and a LOT more cash to throw around.

> For something like this, yeah, Apple default is probably that strong.

I would generally agree; for the vast majority of people the "notes" app works just fine, no need to install evernote or simplenote or whatever.

But in this instance, Apple is expecting you to shell out $10/month. I think that likely kills most of the inertia of, "Well, it's on my phone, I don't need another app." I could be wrong, though. Regardless, I'm not cancelling my Spotify subscription anytime soon.

>But in this instance, Apple is expecting you to shell out $10/month.

Spotify asks for that too. And unlike Spotify, Apple already has your payment details. You don't even need to enter your password with this thumb thing.

I've been an avid Rhapsody user since the early days. One thing that still annoys me about Rhapsody on iOS devices is that if the app has been closed or backgrounded (not playing music) for long enough, hitting the "play" button in control center (or bluetooth devices) often goes back to playing from iTunes - which I don't use.

The ideal solution would be Apple fixing that - allowing for a user-defined default player. I'm sad to say it, but if that doesn't become a reality, I may be tempted to switch to Apple's streaming service for that one reason alone.

That's the exact reason they designed it that way.

Apple is intended to be a walled garden rather than a true equal platform for the app devs. As much as I like Apple hardware I hate their mobile OS because of this approach of building special integrations for their built in apps that you can't even remove, while denying other app devs access to the full range of device integration, except if you go through their limited API's.

They have one thing I'm missing from Spotify: music videos. I was all excited about the "video in Spotify" announcement, only to discover they meant podcasts and TV shows. Maybe this announcement causes some movement.

To be fair "ONE MORE THING!" slot was always for the most important thing of the moment. .

Just to provide an alternative view, I listen to Spotify in my house, but in the car I almost always listen to XM. There is something attractive about not needing to think about what is going to play.

>I would kill to be able to go to the party Spotify will undoubtedly throw tonight.

Yeah, a new service that offers a larger selection for the same price, and will be preinstalled to the majority of their customers phones, and free for 3 months will sure be a great cause for celebration...

>The reason I loved my iPod is because I didn't have to listen to the radio.

And one reason iPod et al. got boring and people turned to places like Spotify is because it's not radio (that is, it's not a shared social experience). That's why stuff like Spotify playlists (curated music) got hundreds of thousands of subscribers. And DJs haven't died, they just took it outside radio, and into arenas, because modern radio has both annoying ads and marketing-oriented programming, something that this announcement is not meant to share.

If done right it could be big, and things can come and go in circles. Heck, there are millions of hipster kids out there buying vinyl, which wasn't even in fashion when they were born.

Indeed. While Apple's execution may be lacking (I don't know if it is), I think it's much more likely that the Spotify people are a bit nervous right now.

My point was that Spotify people are probably a lot less nervous today than they were yesterday. Apple could have completely crushed the company in one fell swoop. Now it looks like they only maybe did that.

Regardless, the marketing behind it was atrocious, relative to standard Apple marketing. The entire "one last thing" of the keynote was, in a word, cringeworthy.

Spotify is horrible. The UI suck, the interface sucks, there is no decent way of organizing my favorite music, discovery is meh (although the only thing that has actually been improving instead of getting worse). And killing the apps has completely reduced the usefulness to streaming all the music available, but only if you know exactly what you want or are satisfied with bland prefab playlists.

The only reason I listen to Spotify is because there is no decent alternative with a sufficient catalog. Like many, I've been dying for a better alternative.

I don't know if Apple Music will be it, but I do remember what the iPod and iTunes did to the MP3 player.

Spotify will be holding a wake tonight, and if I were shareholder I would be offloading ASAP.

IMO that's the key to their offering. Even with all the ways streaming services offer to discover music they fail miserably. Radio is a good way to discover, they have some top class DJ's on board AND I have a hope that people won't be able to buy their way on to it which means that the DJ's can actually play music they sincerely like.

I think you're thinking of radio in it's current form and that's why you don't like the idea - I wouldn't either. But if the DJ's have completely free reign I can see it being really great.

"Free reign" or not, the last thing we need right now is more music shoved into our ears because it's what a few people think we should listen to.

"Really great" is subjective in music, movies, and pretty much anything related to art or entertainment.

Netflix has it right - everyone has individual tastes, so everyone should get individual recommendations. If the quality of those recommendations/algorithms is poor, then that's where the innovation needs to happen (in my opinion).

First of all it's not being shoved in your ear. You can choose to listen and they offer curated playlists etc. as alternative discovery mechanisms. I use Netflix everyday - and usually end up watching repeats of TV episodes because I have no idea what to watch. I use Spotify all day and listen to stuff I know because their radio and playlists are shit. Beasts was the one app I found that actually offered good suggestions or albums and playlists and I spent most of my time on their reconditions screen. Algorithms don't work for this stuff. Maybe they will and we can keep working on it but for now good human curation + algorithms is the key.

Except that those recommendations are really poor. And it's not clear to me at all that there's any way to scale the incoming dataset large enough to get useful results from it. Netflix might have good algorithms but they are handicapped by the shape of their catalog. Music has a much, much larger selection space and currently nobody has a sufficiently deep usage history to make "if you listened to x, you'll likely listen to y" work.

Anywhere but smack dab in the center of the distribution algorithmic music recommendation engines fail completely (save for Pandora, which has a different small catalog problem.)

I agree, especially about Netflix and Pandora's poor recommendations as a product of their limited catalog. I don't however think that humans are any better in this regard. Humans also tend to recommend near the center of a distribution of tastes, and when they stray from that, it's out of a deliberate move to find something new/different. Algorithms can do the same (and many do), but many of those suffer from other problems - such as poor interfaces or limited catalogs as mentioned.

Just because no one has done it really well yet, that doesn't mean we should all go back to human-curated playlists in my opinion.

Edit to add: Perhaps part of my reluctance to rely on DJ's and human-curated playlists is a lack of trust. When a person recommends something to the masses, my gut instinct is to question motives (who is being promoted and why). When an algorithm recommends something to me as part of an unlimited service, I tend to feel like it's been tailored to me for no reason other than to maximize my enjoyment (though admittedly, the truth is that algorithms may be built with just as much - if not more - questionable bias as any human).

I get my music recommendations from music blogs or my local record store, and I always always always find them more relevant than anything an algorithm poops out. Finding a way to scale that up would be interesting, but I also don't really think that there's a lot of money in it. Google could do this, really, or Facebook, I suppose, because they have the huge amount of activity data that could be used to take the place of "Hey, I like this Galactic Cannibal record, what else should I be listening to?"

Music discovery is becoming HARD because the entire A&R scouting system and top 40 radio model is falling apart. I do not want to listen to 200 garage bands to see if any of them is the next Nirvana; I'm quite happy if Apple is going to pay Zane Lowe to do that for me.

Exactly. Great point.

> I don't quite understand why they put so much emphasis on 24/7 radio.

Another thing is that they're lying when they say it's the first global 24/7 live DJ-driven radio station. The BBC's music stations have been broadcasting live and timeshifted online for about 15 years already, unrestricted. I'm sure other broadcasters also do this.

The Current in MN is ad free and has been streaming online for 10+ years.

There are quite a lot of local radio stations that broadcast online for anyone to listen. I picked my favorite local station (http://kslx.com/), found their website, and there's a "Listen Live" button right there.

It seems rather ignorant - willful or otherwise - to claim that this is something groundbreaking. I have no doubt it'll be well-executed, but at best it can be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

> Another thing is that they're lying when they say it's the first global 24/7 live DJ-driven radio station.

My college radio station did this back in 2003.

The whole problem with radio is that it completely misses how music is consumed nowadays.

It's no longer driven by the ivory tower of the music industry.

The whole idea of playlists created by others is that it exposes me as a listener to the long tail of music, mostly composed of everything I want to listen and more. I discover new sounds based on the fact that I am now able to find that other person on the other side of the world who shares my taste. I can skip through the songs and get right to the content I want.

I drive my listening experience, versus the radio station.

I guess you paid no attention to the actual product, which is all and increasing the long tail even to unsigned artists.

How much airplay will unsigned artists get on the 24/7?

This isn't snark, it's a serious question - inspired by the influence 70s and 80s DJs like John Peel had.

They literally made entire careers by playing non-mainstream music no one else would touch. Some of it got a first airing as a demo cassette. Hundreds of bands recorded special sessions for those shows. Some of those sessions became legendary recordings in their own right.

Will this Apple product do anything like that? Or will it be the usual suspects playing the Official Industry Approved Top Downloads list, with no risks of any kind?

Bands like Arcade Fire got big because of radio DJs. Zane Lowe at least tries to discover new artists. I'm sure the other DJs will be similar.

I don't think Zane Lowe's discovery list - which includes a short list of middle-of-the-roaders like Adele and Ed Sheeran - is in quite the same league as John Peel's.

I still miss John Peel, both for his shows on Radio 1 and, I must admit, Home Truths on Radio 4.

>It's no longer driven by the ivory tower of the music industry.

Jimmy Iovine is running this thing. He is the ivory tower. It appears he is trying to recapture the industry.

>I don't quite understand why they put so much emphasis on 24/7 radio. First, I knew few (younger) people who listen to radio.

This can change if there's a enticing offering. Ads, endless automated playlists and crappy programming are not very interesting even for older people. But someone with a unique radio program can potentially get a large following -- like EDM DJs have.

>Second, it's technically not that impressive.

A social service is not about the technology anyway.

>But most importantly: music is very divisive and tastes differ greatly.

That's rather a problem with endless fragmentation than something nice and desirable. Music can also be a uniting force -- and in the past it was, with people able to listen to many genres, not just celebrate their small corner of the music world.

I'm open to the idea that it could work, I guess. But I just can't imagine an 'enticing offering'. What would you consider enticing?

Furthermore, they're not competing with existing radio, but rather with things like Pandora's part-human algorithms and Spotify's many human-curated playlist. As well as the thousands of radio stations that broadcast online.

> That's rather a problem with endless fragmentation than something nice and desirable. Music can also be a uniting force -- and in the past it was, with people able to listen to many genres, not just celebrate their small corner of the music world.

I'd say people moved primarily to non-radio alternatives (big music libraries on devices, spotify/pandora/etc.) because they preferred them, and they finally could do so conveniently. This same phenomenon can be seen in the move away from tv toward on-demand select-your-preference solutions like Netflix (or online streaming via Popcorn time or certain websites).

Or to turn it around: I've never heard anyone complain that they wished they didn't have to 'celebrate their small corner of the music world' and would rather move back to single sources of music if not for the advertising and programming. People love their little corners because it is part of their identity.

There was a big web radio hype in 2000-2001.

"Web Radio Not Making Waves - An unfulfilled Internet vision: thousands of low-cost stations to challenge the status quo."

as titled by LA Times in December 13, 2001, see the article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20011216053056/http://www.latime...

(Many web radio stations are still alive, but the hype is gone)

Exactly. Music is one of the most hype-sensitive industries. It's good that Apple is in the space, but they should be very careful about trying to be 'cool' about it. When they had U2 play some hits, that was innocuous enough. When they released a 'few U2 album' that was actually offensive to people (for a variety of reasons). Then, when Bono came on-stage and high-fived Cook, well, let's forget that moment. Surely their PR 'feelers' are aware of this and should've warned them that letting Drake ramble on stage would not be a great idea...

Radio still has to be a wildly popular format, even though I don't listen to it anymore. Otherwise, Sirius/XM wouldn't still be in business, despite having a limited selection of music and terrible sound quality. All those subscribers can't just be there for Howard Stern.

Also, digital music has become extremely popular, just not online radio. That could be an issue of quality (low) compared to selection (high) or just that a lot of people who utilize connected devices for music prefer listening to their music on iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, etc.

By investing in both sides of the fence, on-demand and curated, they can capture both audiences. And by hiring people like Zane Lowe, they are giving people additional reasons to go listen to radio vs. on-demand.

Ya, that is how Russ Hanneman made his money. He invented radio on the internet.

It's pretty obvious web radio died because of usurious royalty fees [1] compared to terrestrial broadcast.

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2002-07-...

Fashion and taste is a huge part of apple's brand (and the "Beats" brand), and can definitely be apple's competitive advantage in the music space. There's really only two ways for a streaming service to differentiate itself: exclusive content and curated content. If they aren't going for the exclusives, they have to depend on radio.

I think you're underestimating the popularity of radio, too. Pandora and songza are purely radio services, and spotify, google music, and rdio all heavily promote their radio services.

My problem is not the 'radio' part. My problem is that it's a single, 24/7 station, and that they made such a huge deal out of it. The radio concept in itself is indeed very nice, and still very popular (in various forms).

All the examples you name either adapt to your tastes, or offer different 'channels' for different genres. I do see the appeal of that. In fact, I love discovery, and human-powered discovery can be amazing.

The thing that doesn't make sense is that it's 1) a single station, and 2) in no way adjusted to the time and tastes of particular locations.

Why would anyone want to listen to that with exactly the kinds of alternatives you name, on top of the fact that a countless amount of more specific stations can be listened to online?

To make a comparison: imagine if Apple released a new Apple TV and then spent a big chunk of time promoting their single, world-wide channel.

Do you know any people who put on the tv and watch whatever comes on nowadays, without switching channels a few times? And if so, do those people do this because they prefer it over, say, Popcorn Time or Netflix, or just because they're used to doing so, and probably pretty old?

Again, releasing such a 24/7 channel in itself is a nice idea. It just seems really odd to put such an emphasis on it.

Yeah, when I posted that I didn't realize that they were only doing a single station - that's crazy.

I wouldn't disregard it so quick. A good radio host can garner attention and if Apple finds themselves with something like a captivating morning show or lively interview program, they can build an audience. Radio is good at spreading by word of mouth because it can capture a person during their drive and gives them something to talk to coworkers about. If Apple makes it prominent on people's phones, it would be easy to spread.

It would make no sense for people to be excited about a radio station before it launches outside of the DJ's previous audience. There is nothing to hook people in yet. I personally listen to the CBC news on the radio everyday and if Apple launched a news station... who knows. It's not really an area that any other big tech companies are competing in. Sports radio is great if you are a sports fan, maybe they'll expand to that. Other talk radio as well, people love it and live call in shows with a "community" of listeners is still a concept best served in radio.

Commercial radio is terrible because it doesn't make a revenue like it used to. I think people dismiss it more so due to it's low quality than the fact that they can curate their own music now. Playing your own music in your car isn't a new concept.

Wild guess, but maybe radio is part of a long term vehicle plan. Broadcast radio is a significant part of the vehicle user experience. Highest radio ratings during a weekday are 7:45AM.

Also, it's not like running an internet radio station is very expensive anyways. Apple can afford it.

Anyways... No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

This is not one radio station, this is a ton of channels, like SiriusXM and Spotify, which are quite successful. This is also about competing versus Youtube/Google Music in the music discovery business.

No, Beats 1 is literally one channel and they made a huge deal about it being the first global radio station (except for the millions of other internet radio stations I guess).

I think they were making a huge deal about the first global 24/7 live radio station. Most of the other Internet radio stations I know aren't live 24/7.

Live meaning some DJ is going to talk instead of having music on isn't a feature in my book. That said, iHeartRadio has hundreds if not thousands of live 24/7 stations. That's just from one provider too, there are tons of 24/7 live internet radio stations.

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