“The increasingly crowded streaming music industry is starting to look a little more like old-fashioned radio,” Ryan Faughnder reports for The Los Angeles Times. “San Francisco digital music company Rdio Inc., hoping not to be lost amid a sea of new competition, is adding traditional AM/FM outlets to its service. The rollout, which starts Wednesday, includes 460 stations owned and operated by stakeholder Atlanta-based Cumulus Media Inc.”
“The tech firm hopes long-running stations such as Cumulus’ KLOS-FM (95.5) in Los Angeles and KFOG-FM (104.5) in San Francisco, along with talk radio and sports outlets, will help draw more listeners and advertising dollars as Rdio faces increasing competition from the likes of Apple Inc.,” Faughnder reports. “Apple in June kicked off the maiden broadcast of its live Beats 1 radio station, led by BBC Radio 1 alum Zane Lowe. The 24-hour station, programmed from London, New York and Los Angeles, features shows curated by Dr. Dre and Pharrell Williams. That launch coincided with the debut of the Cupertino, Calif., tech giant’s Apple Music streaming service. ‘If you’ve read the tech press over the last few months, you’d think the tech business invented radio,’ Rdio’s chief executive, Anthony Bay, said in an interview.”
“According to Nielsen, more than 90% of U.S. adults listen to radio every week. Adults spend an average of 13 hours a week listening to radio, Nielsen says, compared with 29 minutes with streaming audio,” Faughnder reports. “Rdio has never revealed how many people use its service, but it is thought to lag Spotify, which counts 20 million paying subscribers and 55 million consumers who listen for free with commercials. Pandora says it gets about 80 million monthly listeners. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, said last week that 11 million people were using the free trial version of its new music app.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Beats 1 has sent shivers of fear through the also-rans.
Note: Apple’s iTunes offers, as it has for years, thousands of terrestrial radio stations from around the world available in its “Internet Radio” section.
They also have iTunes University, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
I just received a bill for my next year of SiriusXM, and while I do realize that they are two different mediums, I couldn’t help but notice that a yearlong subscription to SiriusXM is more expensive then a subscription to Apple Music. And with Apple music I can listen to preprogrammed stations (more than SiriusXM has), or I can choose my own music (which I normally do). I think it is time to say sayonara to SiriusXM.
Now if only Apple would clean up the iTunes interface so that it was easier to use. Perhaps I’m just an old fuddy duddy, but I miss the old larger buttons for controlling the music, I also wish that I could rearrange the Apple Music interface so that the things I use most are more accessible.
Come on Apple, I know you can do better with the interface… please
Rdio is awesome. The iOS App, the desktop app, and the web app are flawless. They have actual social sharing features that work and make sense. If you don’t like the Apple Music interface or experience I highly recommend Rdio. I pay $9.99 a month for 2 simultaneous log-ins-even that set up is better. I can use the iOS app on the go while my wife logs on to the desktop app at work at the same time with one account. Anyways I’m excited to hear they are adding “regular” radio too! Sorry MDN but Itunes’ terrestrial radio offering isn’t the same and is terrible.
Cumulus? No thank you.
Because Apple music app eats the iPhone storage in some bad cache situation, I decided to look elsewhere… debating between Spotify and rdio, I chose rdio and find it even better for music discovery, and ui. Make sure you subscribe over the net so you are charged 9.99 and not screwed over for the up charge Apple enforces through the rdio app. Sometimes Apple does not just work anymore…