“Apple Inc. is in talks to license music for a custom-radio service similar to the popular one operated by Pandora Media Inc. according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be a bid by the hardware maker to expand its dominance in online music,” Ethan Smith And Jessica E. Vascellaro report for The Wall Street Journal.
“Such services create virtual “stations” that play music similar to a song or artist of the user’s choosing, either on Web browsers or smartphone apps. Like traditional radio, they are typically free for users, but incorporate advertisements,” Smith And Vascellaro report. “Apple’s service would work on its sprawling hardware family, including the iPhone, iPads and Mac computers, and possibly on PCs running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system, according to one of these people. It would not work on smartphones and tablets running Google Inc.’s GOOG +0.68% Android operating system, this person added, highlighting the mounting battle for mobile dominance between the two technology giants.”
Smith And Vascellaro report, “Apple only recently initiated licensing negotiations with record labels for its putative service and, even if it does complete deals, it could be a matter of months before such a service might launch, according to these people.”
Read more in the full article here.
Well, if anyone could do that… Apple could.
Nice, but I hope Apple does not add it to iTunes. And eventually split up the other categories of iTunes into separate applications.
Good point. Buying apps for your iPhone through iTunes quit making sense on about day 2.
iTunes is the hub for iDevices, so you buy and load music and apps in one place, not two.
How does this not make sense?
How does an app named “Tunes” equal a place to purchase software?
If it were named iDevices, it would be logical.
Why do we need separate applications? If you don’t want to open one of the aspects of iTunes, don’t click on the icon or link.
It isn’t that iTunes does things we don’t want, it is that piling everything into iTunes isn’t logical. What’s next – the iTunes iWord Processor and iMail app? I was in kindergarten when I learned to spot that “one of these things doesn’t belong here.” (Wow, what a flashback that is! 🙂 Honestly, though, the iPandora functionality probably *does* belong in iTunes.
Apple should bring back iSync and either separate all of the content types into their own apps (a la the iOS) with their own libraries that iSync pulls from to sync to your devices (and the best part is that it could remain running in the background using relatively little resources, unlike iTunes which is a rather significant resource hog), or rename iTunes to iSync and pull music, movies, TV, and podcasts out of the app to a wholly revamped iTunes that does essentially the same thing as it does now, but without the syncing and app storage.
I just hope Apple never gets rid of the iTunes Radio feature. Can’t live without my Groove Salad.
Could some body explain to me why it would be better to have multiple apps to do what iTunes does instead of just launching one app?
This line of argument has never made sense to me. I actually find it annoying on the iPad and iPhone that listen/watching are in separate apps from purchasing. I get the idea of feature bloat, but I regularly use most of the features in iTunes (Ping I could live without) and resent having to use other apps to fill in what iTunes won’t do. Automatic finding of lyrics and album art (that works) would be nice additions to the app instead of using Get Lyrical and trolling Amazon.
Because when you have a large quantity of media the monolithic app runs like a snail. I have 26,000+ music tracks, 15,000+ podcast tracks, 350+ audiobooks, 250+apps, 250+ TV seasons, and 200+ movies in my library (3.5 TB and growing) and I literally get the spinning beach ball for ten seconds when I choose any action in iTunes. Any action at all. Pausing or unpausing an already playing track is okay only because I do that through an external app (Sizzling Keys). iTunes is NOT snappy.
On a desktop, I cannot imagine why it would not be in iTunes. I don’t agree with splitting up iTunes for syncing, etc, but at least I understand the logic of WHY people want. Here, you seem to want Apple to have several music player Apps for desktop. Why?
I’m not Willie Wonka, but will try to interpret where I think he is coming from.
I think he is wrong (and so several of you are right) about *this* topic and *this* app being included in iTunes, because it is clearly the same category of what you expect from iTunes.
Purchasing and viewing in different places doesn’t make sense, either. But should movies be purchased in iTunes? Maybe if it were iMedia. The seperate Movie app is annoying when the purchase is made through iTunes. And the disparity between the iPhone app and desktop app is worse. I do play movies from within iTunes on my desktop. And it is there that Apps are purchased through iTunes, but on the phone, there’s a seperate App Store app.
In the Movie example, either works for me. Even though not called iMedia, I can see its inclusion. With Apps, though, the seperate app seems more logical to me. But moving it out to a seperate program on the desktop is a bad idea, because all of those Windows users aren’t going to use multiple apps.
There’s certainly no easy answer. If there were, I’m sure Apple would have “fixed” it long ago. The seperate apps on my phone make more sense to me than everything being in iTunes on the desktop, but I don’t see expanding the desktop environment hapening at all.
Apple the next Microsoft trying to expand into everything
Fleshing out an ecosystem is not expanding into everything. Remember that they were into music a long time ago with iPods and iTunes?
Well said. How much longer do we think that the current”Buy and Borrow” economy will hold until is really ruptures? Apple has done well as have several other companies who 10 years ago were thought to be nothing more than aspiring companies but they need to protect what has made them what they are today. Forget the BS about the stock price and the amount of outstanding shares as that can got South in a hurry. Apple needs to do a few things and do them right and not a lot of things and do them half right. Microsoft is the poster child for the latter.
I see Hyundai and KIA today kicking Toyota and Honda’s butt all over the globe and who would of seen that train coming?
Yeah, well at least Apple leaves you with the choice. I can’t imagine Apple conspiring to “kill” Pandora, as Microsoft attempted against Netscape, Digital Research, and others.
Full disclosure: I’m listening to Pandora (via my A/V receiver) as I write this.
dunno, after a while you start thinking, “How much music does one really need?”..I think the whole music thing is saturated with “enough, already.”
“dunno, after a while you start thinking, “How much music does one really need?”..I think the whole music thing is saturated with “enough, already.”
You are obviously not much interested in music; I guess you’ve only got maybe a few Gb in iTunes, maybe a few dozen CD’s?
For a real music lover, there is no such word as ‘enough’,
although I can’t be bothered with the likes of Spotify or Pandora; data caps make using streaming music sources a non-starter, along with the network limitations, plus I don’t want something that just gives me similar to what I happen to be listening to, I want random variety, I want to hear new things that are different to what I’ve been listening to.
BBC 6Music, the broadcasters digital music station, is the only music source I ever listen to, because of the varity of the things they play.
That station, along with the 112Gb, 14,000+ tracks in iTunes and my iPod, gives me all the music I want, and I’m constantly adding new stuff.
Actually, Apple, can you produce a 256Gb iPod Classic, please, although a 350Gb one would be better… >8^)
I said before iCloud was introduced that streaming music, a la Pandora, would be a mere matter of flipping a switch once the entire iTunes catalog is incorporated into this type of Cloud service. Looks like Apple is ready to flip the switch.
I say free streaming to all iCloud users!! Or a nominal yearly fee to go ad-free.