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Apple Near Deal For Radio Service
An anonymous reader writes "TechCrunch and The Verge are reporting that Apple is near a deal with Universal Music to provide a streaming 'iRadio' music service. 'Apple is expected to launch a web radio service similar to Pandora's later this year, provided that executives there can strike an agreement with Sony Music Entertainment as well as music publishers. Talks with Sony, which operates the third label, Sony Music Entertainment and Sony / ATV, the music publishing company jointly run with the estate of the late singer Michael Jackson, are said to not be as far along towards reaching a deal. ... As for the financial terms, Apple will not receive the steep discounts it had sought for the labels' music.' Apple's 400 million active iTunes accounts could give even Pandora, with its 200 million users, something to worry about. 'For startups and streaming music companies, this means looking closely at the competitive advantages offered by their own platforms and decided how best to position their own services. A key advantage, and one that will likely get emphasized by virtually everyone challenged by an iRadio, is cross-platform compatibility. Apple will likely be able to offer something along those lines through iTunes on Windows, but for the most part it'll be a strictly iOS/Mac affair. That, combined with personalization and recommendation engines, along with other value add features, will be the way to combat an iTunes streaming service, but no matter what, an Apple product will change the face of this market.'"
Yep. Yet another slashvertisement, this time for a rumor/vapor service.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Then why are you reading apple.slashdot.org?
no need to report until either one of actually happens. reading about it every few days gets old when there's nothing concrete new to report.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I do not care who makes the product. As long as the artists make a fair wage, and the content is quality. Good audio quality content is hard to find anywhere on the web. Finding quality MP3 bitrate is hard as well. That is why people turn to apple, because there is quality control. I would love to see a free software foundation built store full of high quality content that artists are proud to be a part of. Developers are artists, and like artists its had to get along, and agree on some thing so large. maybe I should go over to kick starter...... But then Stallman would get mad when the Hollywood types would want to DRM the whole business.
Yes, because the range of music on the iTunes Music Store is simply all top-40 and absolutely nothing obscure, eclectic or independent, isn't it?
I like to choose the music I listen to. I gave up radio long ago.
> an Apple product will change the face of this market
An Android product would make more of a difference, what with the current approx 2:1 ratio in favour of Android usage on smartphones.
I'd say changing one-third of a 10 gazillion smartphone market is pretty significant.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Android has a clear lead over iOS in market share, but no-one cares. Because those Android users use their phones as, well, phones. And they don't spend money.
iOS has almost 100% of the market that matters: smartphone owners who use their smartphones as smartphones and are happy to spend money.
No Itunes 11 is the best itunes since itunes 3 or 4.
Itunes is three distinct products trying to be merged. Itunes Store, iTunes Media player, and Idevice Sync. If the the idevice Sync, and Itunes store where separate from the media player it would be a far better product.
It's also trying to be a e-book library and a file I/O manager for iOS apps. As an e-book manager iTunes is mediocre at best and it sucks for file I/O. Another thing is that quite a few not very computer savvy iDevice novices get confused by the inconsistency of the fact that iTunes is this monolithic all-in-one monstrosity on OS X/Windows but on iOS it is split into several separate Apps. Apple should split iTunes up into separate programs on OS X/Windows to reflect the iOS setup, which is the setup I like better anyway.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Trouble is, most folks on Android are known to loathe "paying for any software."
This is an article about an Apple user being attacked for Piracy by an Apple developer by Hyjacking their twitter accounts and posting confessions of piracy :) http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/ios-apps-hijack-twitter-accounts-post-false-confessions-of-piracy/. Perhaps you should should stop Demonising Android users. I'm personally willing to post screenshots of my Play account, showing all my purchases.
Why does it matter what platforms your streaming solution supports? If someone moves to a platform that doesn't support your service, they just switch to someone who does. If they move to a platform that supports your service, there's almost no barrier to switch over because you are both offering an unlimited supply of streaming music with a variety of channels. When you are providing a service that gives the user nothing of permanence, they have no reason to stay with you.
I don't think iTunes can compete on price at all, there's no way the music industry is going to let margin slip out of their grasp again. So it'll probably be nearly the same price as other services.
Where iTunes might be able to have a bit of a leg up is baking streaming radio support into indie contracts that iTunes carries, so that they automatically get a wider range of music that other services would have a rough time matching since it would involve a ton of separate contracts. Perhaps that's widespread in streaming today, I don't know.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's odd, because I've used iTunes for a while, and I found it not that bad. You never even see the store unless you click on the tiny little store thing on the laft hand side. If you took someone who's never heard of iTunes and told them it was a music player, they probably wouldn't even find the store, assuming they were a standard computer user who doesn't explore the programs they use, and only clicks on the 3 things they really need. It's also nice that it can be used to sync to your iDevice because it knows where all your music is, and it knows all the playlists and which music you like. I'd hate it if I had to have that information somehow synced between 2 different programs just so I could copy music to my music player. Sure it has some shortcomings, and it isn't perfect, but having 3 different programs would be much worse.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Streaming services like Pandora and Rdio aren't radio, they're jukeboxes. Even a canned playlist from another user is missing the human element of an announcer who shares his or her knowledge of the music and bands, as well as adding thought and experience into the segues and sets.There's no spontaneity in these services, no tie to the time of day or local events, no cultural gathering point. Other than music, they exhibit few of the characteristics that make good radio a great listening experience.
And the sad part is MSFT had this shit ready to go and actually gaining share more than half a decade ago until Ballmer killed it for a lame iTunes ripoff because God fucking forbid MSFT do anything other than copy Apple under his watch.
Fricking playsforsure was BRILLIANT, you could use ANY player, from that $20 thumbstick to that $400 PMP, and you could get your tunes from any one of a dozen sites thus keeping prices low and competition high. Most sites gave you so many MP3s free and clear per month, usually enough that at the buck a song iTunes set as the price you were getting the service for basically free, and instead of having to have Internet 24/7 to use it you only needed to hook up once a month to get another load of tunes, which you could choose your own or pick one of a ton of pre-compiled playlists of everything from top 40 - metal, whatever.
if this turns out to be a hit I really hope somebody on the board at MSFT just walks up and bitchslaps Ballmer's fat ass, i really do, because frankly they could have had this but BETTER in practically every way, they already had massive support and the whole infrastructure already up and running, but yet again Ballmer snatched defeat from the jaws of victory because it wouldn't make MSFT into an ersatz Apple. Fucking idiot.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Did your shill friends come in and mod you up? Besides, there is a ton of free internet radio stations out there (I actually have a premium Digitally Imported account) and TuneIn for Android is free. Hell, most Android users I know just use free apps and don't pirate.
Apple has so much money in their war chest, why don't they just buy them outright instead of trying to strike a deal? Is this such a crazy idea? Or maybe they just don't want to actually run them.