“I don’t understand why Apple would do this, but I hear it’s only a matter of time before it unleashes a Pandora competitor called iRadio or something of the sort,” Rocco Pendola writes for TheStreet.
“I bounced the idea off Albert Fried and Company analyst Richard Tullo, who covers Pandora and is a frequent Bloomberg TV contributor,” Pendola writes. “Tullo thinks iRadio ends up a bigger threat to Spotify than Pandora: ‘We think Apple will adopt some Spotify-like features if it can in its iTunes platform as it’s really Spotify which is the direct threat.’ So, not a full-blown streaming Pandora competitor.”
Pendola writes, “That makes more sense. It gets ignored by the largely bearish financial media, but iTunes and Pandora are complementary services; iTunes and Spotify are clearly competitive.”
Read more in the full article here.
WTF kind of name is “Spotify” anyway? Always hated the pretentious name and the software and provided service sucked.
Branding is something that interests me, so I have to ask – what about the name “Spotify” is pretentious to you?
The name actually doesn’t mean anything – when they were trying to come up with a name, one of the founders actually misunderstood the other – “Spotify” wasn’t even what he had said. They found that nothing existed with that name, so they went with it.
They (of course) later made up some BS about “spot” and “identity”, but that had nothing to do with the original name.
Spotify is already in trouble (since the majority of people don’t subscribe), and if Apple does get directly in the space with iTunes radio (whatever it would be called) it would definitely cause bigger problems for them.
I don’t find Spotify’s name to be “pretentious”. I am, however, growing sick and tired of the trend of creating gibberish words to name services. It seems like a concerted effort to weed out the un-hip.
My (least) favorite is Yelp. If no one told you, would you have any clue that it was a restaurant review service? No, you’re just expected to be “hip to the scene” and know what all the coolest, hippest internet services are.
There’s no lower limit to how nonsensical and non-descriptive you can make your new service’s name. If “Yelp” works, how about “Flarb”, “Thppft”, or “PxS@$43Qz)!”?
And if this view officially makes me old, so be it.
——RM
I agree about the naming – a lot of times it seems that a set of Yahtzee dice is required to name a company these days.
Of course, we could also say that “Apple” in no way tells us anything about its offering (although, it was originally “Apple Computer”).
Oh, and “Flarb” is an actual company. 🙂
My assumption is that these gibberish names are chosen for two reasons – they can be protected and differentiated better than common names, and they offer an available .com domain name to set up the critical web presence that didn’t matter a couple of decades ago.
Quaoar.
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/394.html
iTunes radio in v11 continues to be a search nightmare. At a minimum, why not include “favorites” as an option to allow quick access to liked/preferred stations?
Create a playlist with fav stations. Done.
I’d love to see Apple develop a radio service. I use iHeart radio and they now have video commercials before you can select stations. I’m not happy about that. I’m not happy at all. So the sooner the better if Apple can bring out something that will enable me to drop iHeart radio. Bring it on Apple.
If they name it “iRadio”, they’re gonna have to shell out for another trademark:
http://iradio.com
——RM