After spending the last ten years dominating the digital download market, Apple is now looking to follow that up with it's own hybrid music streaming service. Apple intends to take on Pandora and Google for the rights to be the number one streaming music service with what bloggers and tech writers have dubbed iRadio.
So far Apple has managed to sign a deal with Universal, which is the world largest recording company, and on June 2nd they signed an agreement with Warner, while Sony is still holding out over the so called," song skipping," feature. There's also some questions about the payment of royalty advances to some of the major artist on those respective labels. This, however is what enabled Google Play to get it's streaming service up and running so quickly.
iRadio is said to have a feature set that will offer an on demand function, and like Pandora, listeners would be able to rewind or skip a song entirely after listening to a small snippet. At this point it's believed that Apple intends to at least start iRadio as a free service and because of that, many industry insider see it as a "boon," for the music industry.
Apple had hoped to launch iRadio at this summer's Worldwide Developers Conference. I think, and this is just my opinion, that Apple's, "music everyday," commercials are a prelude to things to come. Getting consumers ready for the new streaming service that will no doubt figure prominently as part of iPhone, as well as iPad promotions.
All in all, iRadio sounds like a good thing to me, just like Pandora did, before they began looking to cut their royalty payments to artist. Which brings up the question of whether iRadio will invite independent artists to the table as they did with iTunes. The way I see it, it couldn't hurt. Bringing in the independent artists would mean more variety. More variety would mean a greater selection and a larger audience. Which, might serve to make iRadio, revolutionary.
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