“Apple will soon have a viable and complete streaming service that will put the hurt on the competition, particularly Pandora,” Sean Chandler writes for Seeking Alpha. “Will the majority be charmed by the on-demand, choose-your-own music streaming services, or will people opt in for intelligent services that curate music for them? Services such as Spotify and Beats Music believe in the importance of both (as do I), whereas Pandora insists on the latter. ”
“Spotify has proven that its method will be the dominant form within streaming as it previously revealed it is able to convert one out of every four people to its premium, paid service, as of May of this year. Spotify’s ten million paid subscribers far exceeds Pandora, who only had 3.3 million paying users during the same period,” Chandler writes. “At that time, Pandora had approximately 75 million active users, which means only one out of every 23 users insisted on paying for a subscription. I believe these figures indicate that the people who are willing to pay money for music insist on buying through on-demand streaming services.”
“If Apple can create a compelling integration of Beats Music, it will be at a huge advantage, as was the case when iTunes Radio launched. In a mere eight months, the integration of iTunes Radio within iTunes swiftly captivated 40 million listeners,” Chandler writes. “with Beats Music, I am confident Apple will make the first (wildly) successful integration of music streaming into a product ecosystem. When this happens, all third-party solutions will always start one app download behind.”
Read more in the full article here.
I thought iTunes radio was going to hurt pandora and it hasn’t
I thought iTunes radio was coming to Canada in 2014 and it hasn’t
Set up a US iTunes account and you’re good. Listening to iTunes radio (jazz) right now in Toronto and enjoying it. Good music and very few ads.
I also buy a US iTunes gift card when I go to the states (or buy one online for a small fee) and I have Unblock-us installed on my router. No more silly restrictions on content from iTunes or Comedy Central or Netflix or anyone else (e.g. Kindle). It’s actually all pretty easy.
People use Pandora? Spotify is so much better. iTunes Radio is awful.
iTunes Radio was very bad when first released. Have you listen to it lately?
yes its way better!
Spotify is twice the price of Pandora (comparing full versions). If you have no interest in anything other than smart radio streaming (which many don’t), Pandora can be the better option.
Personally, I like to buy music and have my own files that I can do with as I please. I use Pandora and iTunes Radio as smart radio to discover new music.
While I am a huge Apple fan, I agree that iTunes Radio is awful. Every time I go to listen to the top 50, it plays Jason Derulo’s Talk Dirty to Me three times before playing anything else.
You know you can tell it not to play certain songs, right?
Yes! But still, it shouldn’t play the same song three times…
You can tell it but it will certainly ignore what you tell it in the short-term. In the long-term, well maybe. I’d told it many times to not play Tommy Roe and it still played his music. Pandora would immediately learn not to play Tommy Roe if you told it not to play Tommy Roe.
I’m guessing Apple is deliberately doing this for dubious reasons. No playlist algorithm should be that retarded. Almost anyone can make Apple’s iTunes Smart playlists very intelligent with all the options available.
Honestly, I really like Pandora’s curated playlists because they certainly return what I want to hear very well as far as I’m concerned. I definitely like Spotify because I’m fully in control of what I want to hear. I think there’s room for at least a few streaming companies. Knowing Apple, iTunes Radio will never become anything like Spotify because it offers too much freedom and no Apple control, but there’s hope it could become more like Pandora.
I’ve partially trained iTunes Radio to play what I want to hear and it takes weeks to train but it still occasionally throws out songs that are nothing like the music and artists I specify. That’s just plain stupid it doesn’t comprehend genre or style. Is it possible that many songs in Apple’s vast music catalog are tagged incorrectly? It’s certainly possible its streaming music catalog is vastly different from the purchasing music catalog.
There’s so many weird things about iTunes Radio as if whoever programmed it were strictly coders and knew almost nothing about music. They need to get some people who understand music styles and artists and have them work with the coders. I’d like to see Apple have some detailed help files that explain exactly how to use the iTunes Radio controls to play the music and artists a person wants to hear.
Look, You need to rethink using the word “retarded”. You now have no credibility as it shows your ignorance.