iTUNES RADIO IS HERE
Introduced by SVP Eddy Cue at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at San Francisco's Moscone Center, the service was unveiled thanks to Apple's having secured licensing agreements (either formally announced or approved via the grapevine, as we told ya last week) with the major label groups and pubcos. It'll be integrated into the iO7 operating system and will work on all iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads, and is integrated into iTunes on Macs, PCs and Apple TV.
The "music-discovery service" will have preformatted stations based on trending music on Twitter and will of course enable listeners to program their own stations (as with Pandora). Song choices in the latter instance will be built on Apple's Genius jukebox feature. You can save or share a station, or start a new one based on an artist or song. You can also (as followers of the label negotiations have heard) skip songs.
You will also be able to ask virtual-assistant Siri questions like "Who plays that song?" To which she will invariably reply, "I don't understand the question, 'Who's got a gay sarong?'"
The free version of the service is ad-supported, but users will be able to enjoy it ad-free (and include the music they own as well as what's licensed by the service) by subscribing to the iTunes Match cloud service ($24.99 per year).
Meanwhile--and this will be of particular interest to you, you capitalist pig--there'll be a "buy" button by every song that enables the user to download it directly into her iTunes account.
And that's pretty much it. Do we have a Pandora killer on our hands? Will seamless mobile streaming cannibalize iTunes downloads or boost them? How long before Ivana creates a Van der Graaf Generator station? The answers to these and other musical questions will be forthcoming, no doubt, but we'd love to know what you think.
