“Listening to music used to be as simple as switching on the radio or popping down to your local music store to buy the latest CD, but that’s changed as the internet has allowed people to access whatever content they like, whenever they like,” Mahesh Sharma reports for The Sydney Morning Herald.
“Music listeners will be spoilt for choice next year when Apple is expected to launch the local version of iTunes Radio, unleashing a new wave of channels for Australians to access their favourite music,” Sharma reports. “Apple’s algorithmically-driven predictive song streaming app is expected to instantly bring music streaming technology to the masses, while other market leaders such as Spotify and Pandora, as well as third-party providers such as Sydney’s Omny and Perth’s Discovr, develop new ways to provide unique, personalised services.”
“iTunes Radio will be an overnight success, according to Ed Hooper, whose radio app Omny splices personalised information such as weather and traffic, breaking news and podcasts into music streams” Sharma reports. “[Hooper said], ‘Twenty million users for iTunes radio is as easy as 20 million iPhone users thinking ‘I wonder what that button does?’ For Spotify, it’s meant a lot of hard work, getting users to install and use their applications.'”
Read more in the full article here.
It’s amazing to think how many options we have now for music. I now have iTunes Radio on my Apple TV, MacBook Pro and our iPhones, iPods and iPads, besides all the purchased music stored on them and my old 160GB Apple TV.
I also have Pandora, internet radio, a bajillion CDs, and best of all my Sirius XM in my car. Oh yeah, and I’ve got a ton of songs on an external hard drive hooked up to my PC at work.
Now that I think about it this is a bit ridiculous.
I concur.
I still like pandora better. iTunes Radio plays the same few songs over and over. To repetitive
Only if you don’t train it.
Mine does not.
How do u train it. I’m not giving up on it.
I had the same issues but then found that I needed to set the options for more variety or discovery. This works reasonably well and songs do not get repeated as often.
This still needs tweaking but for the first iteration it is not bad. Since I have iTunes Match I also don’t have to deal with advertisements which was a drag in Pandora.
My next big wish is to have a one touch button for adding to my wish list.
One thing I don’t like about iTunes Radio is that once you create a station, you can’t go back and edit it to fine-tune it.
I usually create a station with multiple criteria. I happen to like 80’s Freestyle music so I’ll start off with that as my lead genre. Then I’ll start adding different Freestyle artists over various periods of years using Variety or Discovery and sometimes I’ll add a somewhat overlapping genre like Italo-Disco or Eurobeat which have some similar characteristics. Through trial and error you can create a station that almost never has repeat plays of songs.
I’ll sometimes create a station with a couple of genres and a dozen or so various Freestyle or Eurobeat artists with alternating Variety or Discovery depending on how much I like that artist.
Apple needs to implement a Station Edit mode (like iTunes Playlist Editor) where you can go back into that particular station you created and make modifications instead of having to recreate a station all over again from scratch. If Apple had something like that you could really fine-tune a station by testing it and then modifying it some more after you hear the results. I really like iTunes Radio but that limitation can really but a crimp in things. Now, I have to write down on paper how I created the station and then redo it with modifications. I swear, Apple could easily compete with Pandora if it wanted to but I don’t think that’s Apple’s goal to try to put Pandora out of business. I still think Apple should hire someone who knows a bit about programming a Station Editor just like the way iTunes has a Playlist Editor.