“I’ve certainly been using it a lot, but I keep going back to Rdio because of iTunes Radio’s bizarre limitations and frustrations,” Graham Spencer writes for MacStories. “At the top of the list is the mind-boggling decision to limit users to 6 song skips per hour — regardless of whether or not you are a paying member of iTunes Match. Sure, that limitation can be side-stepped by setting up multiple similar stations (Alternative Radio and Alt-Pop Radio, for example), but then you run into the issue of songs being repeated too often. Besides, why should I need to create and switch between stations if I don’t want to hear some songs?”
“In a similar vein, tough luck if you want to replay a song immediately, let alone seek back 30 seconds to the chorus,” Spencer writes. “Or maybe you accidentally forgot to pause iTunes Radio, left the room, and now want to go back two songs so you can hear them — well, sorry, but you can’t.”
“I find a lot of the choices Apple made in iTunes Radio to be really peculiar,” Spencer writes. “Unfortunately, a lot of them seem like compromises in order to keep their iTunes Music Store from being undermined, or maybe it was because this was the only way they were going to succeed in their negotiations with the record labels to launch the service… Apple has repeatedly shown that it is unafraid to cannibalise even the most successful of its businesses with new products. The iTunes Music Store is certainly successful, but its contributions to the firm’s profits are minimal compared to their hardware businesses, so it is odd to me that they would handicap iTunes Radio in the ways that they have. So although Eddy Cue and Apple in general are known to be ferocious negotiators, I can’t help but feel maybe they were forced into a corner when negotiating with the music labels over iTunes Radio.”
Much more in the full article here.
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