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iTunes Radio Is Now "Apple Music" (and You Need a Subscription)

Posted by timothy on from the enjoy-our-special-offer dept.

New submitter Kevin by the Beach writes: If you haven't noticed... If you try to play iTunes radio on your devices it is now paywalled (you can get a free three month trial at apple.com/music). The only reason I noticed is that I have an Apple TV which at one time had an iTunes Radio App. That app is no longer. Same is true if you select Music on your iOS devices, if you get to the iTunes Radio menu, you are redirected to sign up for the free trial. This reminds me of why I am forever reluctant to trade the music I have locally (on CDs, hard drives, and a few bits of vinyl I've been unwilling to jettison) for any kind of streaming service, whether it promises perpetuity or good-until-next-payment.

53 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Radio != downloads by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Also, SomaFM cannot be replaced by anything.

    1. Re:Radio != downloads by bigfinger76 · · Score: 1

      I love me some SomaFM! I was late to the game, discovering it only last year upon installing RadioTray (Linux). I've been hooked on Groove Salad ever since, abd I don't even consider myself a fan of electronic music. But it's perfect as background music on tinny speakers.

  2. Physical media is king by TWX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This reminds me of why I am forever reluctant to trade the music I have locally (on CDs, hard drives, and a few bits of vinyl I've been unwilling to jettison) for any kind of streaming service

    Absolutely. Yes, it can be a pain to store physical media. Yes, it can be a pain when media formats change over time. Yes, it can be a pain when one makes the wrong choice when new competing formats come out and the one chosen ends up being the loser.

    On the other hand all of the media that I own, across vinyl, cassette tape, compact disc, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray can be played at any time and so long as my machines continue to work, will always be playable, and given that I still find good used machines for all of these formats I don't expect to be in the situation of not being able to find a functional player in my lifetime.

    And all of this is even before getting to the concept of ripping the content to digital.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:Physical media is king by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Physical media doesn't have an unlimited shelf life due to decay of the physical media. Do your cassettes still work?

    2. Re:Physical media is king by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It seems to me that this is not exactly relevant to the change. Apple had a free broadcast Internet radio service which they've moved to include into a paid subscription steaming service. The issue of "buying" never entered into it.

      There have actually been events where your argument would be more applicable. For example, Microsoft ran a service where you could "purchase" DRM-protected music. They then shut down that service and all the music people had "purchased" became useless. That's a good reason to talk about buying CDs rather than subscription services.

      What we have here is more comparable to, if a normal free FM radio station decided to move to SiriusXM, and you now had to pay to listen. It's reasonable to be displeased with the change, but it doesn't really make sense to be like, "that's why I purchase all of my radio stations, so that they can never be taken away from me."

    3. Re:Physical media is king by CrashNBrn · · Score: 1

      When it comes to VHS or audio cassettes, "work", is highly subjective. Since "work" includes: warbled to hell and back.

    4. Re:Physical media is king by Yergle143 · · Score: 1

      I recently was planning to digitize a number of cassette recordings -- radio broadcasts from the early 80's -- and well the horror. Hiss. And these were high quality cassettes.
      As with the commercial cassettes easily the worst format in the century of recorded sound -- I think wax cylinders and piano rolls hold up better.

    5. Re:Physical media is king by BitZtream · · Score: 1, Flamebait

      Absolutely. Yes, it can be a pain to store physical media. Yes, it can be a pain when media formats change over time. Yes, it can be a pain when one makes the wrong choice when new competing formats come out and the one chosen ends up being the loser.

      Or you could rip it to a lossless format and then none of that matters and you can put it on any physical media you want without degradation of the original. This is what normal people do to turn that physical media into digital media, maybe you've heard of it?

      On the other hand all of the media that I own, across vinyl, cassette tape, compact disc, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray can be played at any time and so long as my machines continue to work, will always be playable, and given that I still find good used machines for all of these formats I don't expect to be in the situation of not being able to find a functional player in my lifetime.

      Actually, no, they won't. They already are probably not playing the same as when you bought them. Yes, even your blu-ray and DVDs probably already have bitrot that you just haven't noticed.

      All of those things degrade over time. Your VHS and Cassettes were shit long ago. DVD and Blu-Ray will have a few more years before the bitrot starts to make them have errors, and your vinyl is absolutely fucked if you leave it in a car with the windows rolled up on pretty much any sunny day anywhere on the planet, including inside the antarctic and arctic circles!

      Every copy of them you make is different than the original, and degraded along the way. Let me guess, you think that makes them sound better because you're an audiophile? And you know how its supposed to sound with your Monster brand HDMI cable thanks to its superior signal quality for those digital bits.

      Both you and the person you're responding to are making silly arguments that aren't even actually true justifying the fact that you're holding onto degraded and living in a fantasy world where that doesn't happen because ... well. cause you said so?

      Your post points out all these 'benefits' to your physical media ... and every single one of them is exactly the opposite of reality.

      Do you even own a cassette or mp3?

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    6. Re:Physical media is king by Mike+Van+Pelt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, the worst format of the 20th century was 8-Track. Truly hideous.

    7. Re:Physical media is king by tepples · · Score: 2

      Just about everything else is available on-demand via streaming services

      Let me know what streaming service offers the film Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night or the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea in the United States.

    8. Re:Physical media is king by TWX · · Score: 1

      My media are stored in a cool, dry environment. I have Laserdiscs with "Discovision" on them that work just fine. None of the collection has "Laser Rot" and they're stored so they won't warp. Why should I re-purchase?

      In fact we do re-purchase, but with a two-format rule. If we have it on VHS it has to be on at least DVD. If it's on Laserdisc it has to be Blu-Ray, or it has to be so inexpensive on DVD as to make it a pocket-change purchase.

      I'm not going to spend my money without a real improvement. I've held-off buying movies like Hatari! again because the technical reviews of the transfers have cited them as lacking, so unless the quality actually improves it's not worthwhile. Back in the day I'd bought a DVD version of Highlander only to find that it was digitally blocky, somehow the encoding had gotten screwed up. The Laserdisc looks far better.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    9. Re:Physical media is king by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 1

      Physical media doesn't have an unlimited shelf life due to decay of the physical media. Do your cassettes still work?

      When I was a kid in the I bought a box of old cassette albums at a garage sale. Most of them were made in the 1960s, including gems such as "In-A-Gadda Da-Vida" and Wilson Pickett's cover of "Hey Jude". They still work just fine, and I ripped them to mp3s a couple of years ago.

      (Those cassettes do feel much heavier than modern ones, and IIRC, they say "Made in Elk Grove Village, IL by Ampex". I suspect that they were quite a bit pricier than the vinyl versions when they were new.)

      I've also ripped all my vinyl records, some made in the 1950s, and hundreds of CDs, many going back to the 1980s, without any significant errors. The only format that's had a lot of problems were my handful of 8-track tapes, about half of which had the loop break at the splice or the foam pressure pad disintegrate.

    10. Re:Physical media is king by Aaden42 · · Score: 1

      Nothing wrong with a DRM-free digital copy. I can back that up wherever I like, format convert it, etc.

      iTunes music purchases have been DRM-free for years. I have my purchases backed up in several places. As an added benefit, for at least as long as Apple chooses to let me, I can re-download those purchases any time on new devices where ever I have Net access. That's a nice convenience for me.

      iTunes video is a different story, which is why I have very few video purchases of things I just had to watch right now. Two seasons of Dollhouse, and one episode of Glee (don't just me, it was the one with N.P.H. in it...).

    11. Re:Physical media is king by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      I recently was planning to digitize a number of cassette recordings -- radio broadcasts from the early 80's -- and well the horror. Hiss. And these were high quality cassettes.
      As with the commercial cassettes easily the worst format in the century of recorded sound -- I think wax cylinders and piano rolls hold up better.

      Dolby?

      Commercial tapes were often non-dolby and cassette tape hiss was a problem even on new tapes. Dolby addressed that by specifically tailoring the recorded signal towards the high-end frequencies where hiss comes in.

    12. Re: Physical media is king by Jason+Levine · · Score: 1

      I really need to figure out a good way of digitizing an audio cassette tape my parents made when my sister and I were really young. Unfortunately, most solutions I've found so far would cost too much for one cassette recording lasting about 10 minutes.

      --
      My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
    13. Re:Physical media is king by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Three of those formats warp and degrade over time.
      Two more of those formats corrode and degrade over time.
      I'm not sure about the longevity of Blu-Ray but I'm not optimistic.

      Don't assume anything is forever. I have plenty of media which hasn't lived as long as the machine capable of reading it.

    14. Re:Physical media is king by present_arms · · Score: 1

      My cassettes still work, I even have some 8-tracks that play well, for different values of the word "well" I have some cassettes from the early 70's that still play back without drop outs, I guess it's how you look after them, as for optical media, that's a different story early cd's are doing much better than the ones from this century. That goes for dvd's and BR too, however I haven't had a BR fail yet. Alie

      --
      http://chimpbox.us
    15. Re: Physical media is king by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      There is minimal work to do, likely : adjust the input volume or gain (and maybe output volume on what plays the cassette) till you like how it sounds. Has to be mentioned since by just leaving the volume at 100% you might have very easily avoidable saturation, excessive noise.

  3. Re:This is a bug by thechemic · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Apple bashing is the only reason I come here!

    --
    Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
  4. There's a term for this approach. by sehlat · · Score: 1

    It's called Rent Seeking.

    It can also be called rent to own, where the owned property is the customer.

    1. Re:There's a term for this approach. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      You keep using that word. Apple's behaviour in this context has nottathing to do with rent-seeking, an important concept in public choice theory.

    2. Re:There's a term for this approach. by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      To play devil's advocate, it arguably could be considered rent seeking.

      Rent seeking, as I understand it, means making minor changes that do not benefit the consumer but result in the consumer paying you to do something that he or she used to be able to do for free, with the caveat that the term is reserved for situations where someone else (e.g. the government) paid for most or all of the infrastructure that is being used, and the rent seeker is just taking advantage of that infrastructure to make money.

      In this case, iTunes Radio was an Apple-developed streaming music service, so superficially it could be argued that this isn't rent seeking. However, iTunes has had streaming radio support since the very early days, originally starting with a list provided by Kerbango. When Apple introduced iTunes Radio in 2013, they made it harder to get access to those stations, and have made it progressively harder to do so over time, culminating with this change, which effectively forces users to pay them a fee for access to streaming radio stations that are (other than the lack of advertising) very similar to what they could get for free in early versions of iTunes.

      IMO, whether someone does or doesn't see this as rent seeking pretty much boils down to how that person would answer two questions:

      1. Is iTunes Radio significantly better than those free alternatives? If so, it isn't rent seeking, because they're contributing value. It would still be somewhat dubious, because they're deliberately making it harder to use free alternatives that also contribute value, albeit less value, but that's not enough to make it rent seeking. If iTunes Radio isn't significantly better, then it still could be considered rent seeking. (I have no opinion on this, as I didn't bother to use even the free services, much less the new paid services.)
      2. Does it matter that Apple is the only reason those free stations were available in iTunes to begin with? I would argue that this one doesn't matter, because the availability of that functionality for free in iTunes eliminated any reason for third parties to make the functionality available themselves, which effectively made access to the free resource dependent upon Apple, but without Apple providing any tangible benefit over other free apps that would have appeared naturally in the market without their interference early on.

      So whether it is or isn't rent seeking is not as cut and dried as you make it out to be, IMO.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  5. Re:VMware by Gojira+Shipi-Taro · · Score: 1

    And I think it's significantly less so. Amazing how opinions differ and "nerds" actually don't all care about the same shit all the time, isn't it?

    --
    "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
  6. Re:VMware by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

    Why? I use iTunes much more frequently than VMware. In fact, even amongst the Slashdot elite here, there are many more iTunes users (sucks to be us, I suppose) than VMware.

    It's just the way the world rolls.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  7. (and You Need a Subscription) by frovingslosh · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty damn sure that I don't need a subscription to that.

    --
    I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
  8. About to jump the shark... by Sigmon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Apple overcame the problem that often drove me away from purchasing CDs from the music industry... Being forced to pay $12-18 for one or two songs I want and a bunch of junk I don't care about. Now I find this Apple Music junk popping up on my iPhone half the time when I, say, search my music library for a song. It's starting to get annoying and if they don't back-off they're going to kill their golden goose.

  9. Its because of the money by randomErr · · Score: 1

    Apple thought more labels would give cheaper rates on streaming in the radio format. They didn't. So Apple went the commercial radio path. Most people went back to more established entities like IHeart radio. All that was left for Apple was to go the pay XM radio route. Unless Apple buys out some of the other pay-for-music stream services they'll eventually have to shut down their service as well.

    --
    You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
    1. Re: Its because of the money by Karlt1 · · Score: 1

      Or just maybe since they killed their ad platform, they just decided to get out of the ad supported music platform entirely.

  10. Re:Remember when... by MachineShedFred · · Score: 1

    I remember when it was called SoundJam, and could transfer music to non-Apple MP3 players (when they still existed) with a simple iSync plug-in being written by the player manufacturer.

    Those were the days...

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  11. Re:VMware by jeffmflanagan · · Score: 1

    Agreed, since this Apple story is consumer news at best, propaganda at worst, and definitely not news for nerds.
    I had not heard about the VMWare layoffs, so thanks for your post!

    http://arstechnica.com/informa...

  12. Physical CDs ... by gstoddart · · Score: 2

    This reminds me of why I am forever reluctant to trade the music I have locally (on CDs, hard drives, and a few bits of vinyl I've been unwilling to jettison) for any kind of streaming service, whether it promises perpetuity or good-until-next-payment.

    I'm not willing to having streaming only media.

    I'm not paying for the bandwidth to listen to every song. I'm not asking some greedy corporation for permission to play the song every time I play it. I'm not providing some greedy corporation with information or data every time I play it. I'm not having some greedy corporation tell me I'm not allowed to listen to my music because I'm on vacation. And I'm sure as hell not allowing some greedy corporation to decide I no longer have access to it.

    I'll do what I've always done ... buy the CD, thereby ensuring the artist gets paid, rip the CD into DRM free MP3, and then forever not give a shit what the copyright bastards think.

    When I buy CDs I buy them very infrequently, buy a very large quantity in one go (usually 40-50 in a go). I have a large CD collection, and I'm sure as hell not pirating your stuff.

    I don't give a damn about your subscription model, your on-going revenue, your permission to play it wherever I choose, or if you think I'm allowed to make backups of it.

    Piss off with your subscriptions and your paywall ... I am the guy who still buys music, stop trying to find new ways to make me stop doing it.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:Physical CDs ... by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      I guess I just don't get the haughty morality of it. It's like some people aren't happy with "No, I don't like the terms of this service, no thank you" and they find some kind of personal affront so they can stand for something instead of just being a consumer taking their business elsewhere. Like "I don't like it" isn't enough in the face of "I don't like it, and also you're an asshole".

      The problem is, there's usually no "elsewhere" to go. When one business comes up with bad terms of services, other similar businesses quickly conclude that they can get probably away with it, and follow suit. By the time customers have time to react, there's no way to get away from them.

      And it has little to do with individuals wanting to protect an investment, but rather with their desire to actually be able to invest, rather than repeatedly paying for something ephemeral and not invest at all.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    2. Re:Physical CDs ... by tepples · · Score: 1

      In this case, the "elsewhere" is switching from the pop music scene to the Creative Commons music scene.

    3. Re:Physical CDs ... by bughunter · · Score: 1

      That's because people over 40 remember when the record industry model was that you pay once buy a recording and can listen to it until you wear it out.

      Now they're trying to change the model into pay per listen. To us onion-belters, it's just wrong. But my 20-something nieces don't think twice about it.

      --
      I can see the fnords!
  13. Re:VMware by jeffmflanagan · · Score: 1

    That's because iTunes is a consumer product. Should /. prefer pop "news" over technical news?

  14. Zombo by OzPeter · · Score: 1

    I was going say that why would I need iTunes Radio when I have Zombo com But sadly it is not online at the moment.

    Welcome ... to ZomboCom. This ... is ... ZomboCom. Welcome. This is ZomboCom; welcome ... to ZomboCom. You can do anything at ZomboCom. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself.

    --
    I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
  15. Translation: by Schnapple · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "A giant company gave me an incredible service to use for free for many years. Now they have the audacity to require me to start paying for it instead of continuing to offer it to me for free in perpetuity. In response I will proudly brag about the completely unrelated point of how I continue to possess the physical items which I was in no way being told to get rid of before anyway."

    I agree it's unfortunate that the free radio stations are gone (although Beats 1 continues to be free) but getting all high and mighty about how you still have albums on disc and DRM-free formats (which I do as well, for what it's worth) is unrelated and annoying to trot out.

    --

    Schnapple

  16. Ummm, you can buy DRM-free music from Apple by Brannon · · Score: 2

    It's not super clear what you're yelling about.

  17. Pump up the Services by R3d+M3rcury · · Score: 1

    At the last investor call, Tim was talking up Apple's services. With iPhone sales slowing, Apple has to do something to take advantage of their installed base.

    Wait a few months and they'll be rethinking their attitudes on advertising...

  18. iTunes Radio what?? by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

    iTunes Radio sucked anyways. Just use iHeartRadio instead.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
    1. Re:iTunes Radio what?? by tepples · · Score: 1

      iTunes Radio sucked anyways. Just use Clear Channel instead.

      I thought people were using streaming services to get away from what iHeart (the new name for Clear Channel) stations were playing.

    2. Re:iTunes Radio what?? by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      With iHeart, the selection goes beyond local and thus a whole lot more content is available. I live in Houston but can listen to AM radio (WOR) in New York if I wanted too. In fact, often I will listen to 740AM (KTRH) in my car rather than just tune with the radio simply because at audio is so much better; no fading, static, hissing, etc.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
  19. show me a viable alternative . by swell · · Score: 1

    Using v12.x from last year: I have direct access to 1000+ radio stations worldwide, sorted by genre in iTunes. Real radio stations, not made up music lists (although Apple offers that too in iTunes). Additionally I have access to 100,000+ worldwide radio broadcasts by plugging the internet address into iTunes (when I can find that information).

    Beyond that I have access to uncountable podcasts, both audio and video on any imaginable topic. Then there is iTunes U which offers educational material from universities around the world. iTunes offers to organize all this on my hard drive, to sync it with other devices, to back everything up in the 'cloud', and even to filter content for children who might use the computer. Despite all that it does, iTunes is remarkably user friendly and attractive to look at. All this costs nothing. I can choose paid content very conveniently if desired.

    I spend around 6 hrs/day with various iTunes content including TEDtalks; obscure podcasts related to my work; blues, jazz classical & zydeco radio and much more. If you know a program that offers more for less, tell us about it. I'm very sorry for the loss of radio stations in future versions, but I expect that they will still be accessible in the My Music folder by entering the broadcast address.

    --
    ...omphaloskepsis often...
  20. Re: This is a bug by Redbehrend · · Score: 1

    This was planned are you so short sighted to see this, they even bought other apps that were sub based before hand. It's not apple bashing it's the truth. Maybe some extra stuff got restricted but this has been the end game for a long time.

  21. Re:VMware by castionsosa · · Score: 1

    My worry is that they are tossing the baby out with the bathwater. From today's news, the entire VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion teams were axed. As someone who uses VMWare on a daily basis... and pays for the upgrades every year, this is very concerning, because VMWare is often the difference between dropping back to an AutoProtect snapshot if a web browsing VM gets infected versus a lot more time spent rebuilding actual hardware.

    Yes, there are other solutions out there... but the real world pretty much runs on vSphere, ESXi, and that stack, so having the ability to make VMs that can easily be moved from a local desktop to clusters is a very important feature. Plus, VMWare Workstation is excellent at using memory tricks to shoehorn a number of VMs into a test workstation.

    Hopefully VMWare as a tier 2 hypervisor product won't go away. It is a very useful tool, although for most purposes, free tools like VirtualBox are almost as good.

  22. Tim Cook screws it up AGAIN. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This latest move is a textbook example of "how to alienate customers".
    And since Cook is the big boss, I think it is fair to lay the blame at his feet.

    Squeezing customers for every last bit of money makes many intelligent
    customers seek alternatives. And there are ALWAYS alternatives ( that should be
    emphsasized in every business school, though I doubt it is ).

    If the above is tl/dr then here's the short version :

    FUCK iTunes Radio.

  23. Sosumi by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  24. Zombo has gone HTML5 by tepples · · Score: 1

    This is not down. This is Zombo Com.

  25. Re: This is a bug by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

    Right now the iTunes Radio page is just blank, with t he Apple Music logo in the middle.

  26. False Dichotomy by radarskiy · · Score: 1

    "This reminds me of why I am forever reluctant to trade the music I have locally (on CDs, hard drives, and a few bits of vinyl I've been unwilling to jettison) for any kind of streaming service,"

    There are exactly 0 streaming services that take away your existing physical media when you sign up. There are also exactly 0 streaming services that prevent you from buying physical media.

  27. Re:Streaming media is king by nbritton · · Score: 1

    Yes but do you have instant access to 20 million tracks? A subscription costs less than the price of buying a new album every month.

  28. Cost of quality by tepples · · Score: 1

    In fact, often I will listen to 740AM (KTRH) in my car rather than just tune with the radio simply because at audio is so much better; no fading, static, hissing, etc.

    But is this better audio worth paying $30 per month to a cellular carrier for a data plan in order to get Internet in your car?

    1. Re:Cost of quality by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      I'm already paying for data with my iPhone, and I've never got beyond my 4GB cap. I just pipe ihartradio and Pandora through the Lightning cable; although BT Audio paring works, I prefer to keep my phone charged while on the road. FYI, I'm using an Aftermarket head unit (Alpine).

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.