Once again, I've managed to neglect my blog in its infancy. Not a good way to gain traction! Rather than rambling about how busy my life is, I'll just delve right in where I left off with a quick follow-up announcement. Soon, I plan to make an easy reference table comparing the different services I've covered.
As previously referenced, Apple followed through with its release of the not-so-creatively named iTunes Radio (colloquially dubbed iRadio), which was officially announced at this year's WWDC. Surprisingly, though, the final product turns out to be more of a direct competitor to Pandora, rather than taking on Spotify.
The jist of Radio is that it will be a free, ad-supported Internet radio service where users can create a radio station (i.e. automatic playlist) based on an artist, album, or song. You'll be able to skip tracks (unclear what the skip limit will be) and like or dislike songs, so as to improve stations to your taste. You'll be able to buy a song or album directly from iTunes if you come across one you like. If this sounds familiar to Pandora or even the free version of XBox Music, it is. The biggest difference is that while Pandora boasts probably the best song selection engine, the Music Genome Project, Apple's library is vastly superior (less than a million songs versus around 35 million). Subscribers to iTunes Match ($25/year) will get ad-free listening. Finally, the service will feature social integration a la Twitter's #music (showing trending songs, etc.).
Basically, iTunes Radio looks like Pandora on steroids, but doesn't really offer anything new. Unlike XBox Music's premium service (or Spotify premium, Google Music, et al.), there is no on-demand streaming or downloading to local storage. It simply fills a gap in the same way the free version of XBox Music does for Windows 8 and Windows Phone users. iTunes Radio will have decent success if only because of the pre-installed, huge base of iOS users, and because Apple has a knack for making its products so easy they're impossible to not use. The biggest reason Radio will exist is because it provides great incentive to get users to purchase songs from iTunes that they find on Radio. The genius of Apple...
UPDATE: iTunes radio has officially debuted with the release of iOS 7.
In other news, Microsoft finally opened up XBox Music to Android and iOS, and made the service available on the Web. That means you can download the app for iPhone or your Android phone or tablet and use the service, provided that you pay for an XBox Music pass. That's great news because the service is a solid offering and gives even more choice to Apple and Android users. However, there are a few key missing features - namely, that the iOS and Android apps currently don't offer offline listening and Smart DJ (Microsoft's version of streaming radio / smart playlists) is missing, whereas both these features are fully functional on the Windows Phone app. Oh, and there's no iPad app yet. It's bewildering why these features weren't included from launch. I understand Microsoft will be adding these features back in soon, but until it does, I can't whole-heartedly recommend the product over other choices just yet. That said, Google should take note and make haste in opening up Google Play All Access to iOS (which they've promised to do) and possibly Windows Phone.
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