About.com Rating

Dec. 9, 2013

The Good

• Easy to use
• Well-integrated into iTunes
• Solid music discovery features
• Ad-free with iTunes Match subscription

 

The Bad

• No new or must-have features
• Essentially matches competitors
• Song selection can be odd
• Ad-free iTunes Match benefits are tied to device

 

The Price
Free, or remove ads with $25/year iTunes Match subscription

Thanks to the iTunes Store, Apple has long been one of the dominant players in online music, but as music listening turns more to streaming than downloads, it was being left out.

In response, Apple launched iTunes Radio, a streaming music service built into iTunes and the iOS Music app, in Sept. 2013. While iTunes Radio has everything you’d expect from this sort offering, it doesn’t hold any surprises either.

Familiar Functionality

If you’ve used Pandora, operating iTunes Radio will feel very familiar. Simply, you begin with an artist or song and create “station” based on that choice. Apple then plays other music for you that is in keeping with your initial choice (there are also Apple- and guest-curated stations). Songs then play, radio-style.

As songs play, you have a few choices: save them to a wishlist for later purchase at the iTunes Store, skip to the next song (skips are limited to 6 per hour per station; when you approach your limit, a warning appears beneath the skip button, which is a great touch I haven’t seen elsewhere), ask iTunes Radio to play more like it or to never play it again (these features mimic Pandora’s thumbs up and thumbs down buttons).

You can also see a full list of the songs you’ve liked and removed from each station by clicking on the station.

From that list, you can remove those songs if you marked them by mistake. While this feature is necessary, I’m unsure if the execution here is ideal. On one hand, it’s great to be able to see all the songs that comprise your station and to make that information easy to find. Pandora has this feature, but it’s so deeply buried that I didn’t know it existed until I researched this review. On the other hand, a station that you listen to a lot, or has existed for a long time, is going to accumulate a lot of data, which won’t be very easy to read.

A nice feature offered by this screen is history, allowing you to see what’s played recently. This is great if you want to remember what you heard, buy it, or even create a new station based on that song. Not all competitors have this. For instance, Spotify Radio offers history, too, but it’s only a few songs deep.

Ad-Free, Except When It’s Not

ITunes Radio is free to all users who have an Apple ID and that free version includes ads. If you subscribe to iTunes Match for US$25/year, ads are removed. There’s an interesting catch here, though. The information about your iTunes Match subscription is tied to the device you’re listening on, not your Apple ID, so if you don’t enable iTunes Match on a device where you use iTunes Radio, you’ll get ads even though, as a subscriber, you shouldn’t.

For me, this means that listening on my iPhone or Macbook Pro, both of which have iTunes Match enabled on them, is ad-free. However, if I listen on my work computer, where I don’t want to enable iTunes Match, I get ads that I shouldn’t. Not a big issue, it would be nice if Apple could make any device using my Apple ID aware of my iTunes Match subscription status.

Music Discovery

You can tune each station to help you discover new music, play hits from within the station, or balance the two. This functionality is solidly useful, but can also induce the occasional headscratch. One of my stations, built around southern rocker Jason Isbell, has delivered me a lot of new music in his style. I’ve been introduced to a number of artists that I wasn’t familiar with, a few of which I’ve really enjoyed.

That said, sometimes you don’t get much of the music you expect. For a station based around Jason Isbell, it plays a surprisingly small amount of his solo music and then usually only from his latest album, “Southeastern” (he’s as well, or better, represented from his time in Drive-By Truckers).

When it comes to discovering new music, Pandora does something that iTunes Radio doesn’t seem to: it takes chances. If you listen to a Pandora station long enough, and provide it feedback, every so often Pandora will slip in music that has little to do with what you’re listening to in an attempt to diversify the station and help you discover more new music. As far as I can tell, iTunes Radio takes no such chances.

The Bottom Line

ITunes Radio is an effective, easy to use, nicely integrated service for listening to, and discovering, music. But is that enough?

For me, the answer right now is no. Users these days are overwhelmed with options for streaming music. From Pandora to Spotify, Rdio to Songza, the choices feel almost endless, many of them offer free options, and almost all of them draw from roughly equivalent music catalogs. ITunes Radio is a solid entry into this scene. It does exactly what you’d expect and out of the gate it’s achieved rough parity with Pandora. That’s an impressive statement, given how long Pandora has had to refine its offering.

But rough parity isn’t really good enough. With so many options, a new entry into the space can’t just be as good as the rest. It needs to be better in some way, offer some features that no one else has. Right now, iTunes Radio doesn’t have that thing that makes it different. As a result, I find that I go long stretches (like weeks at a time) without listening to iTunes Radio—and I don’t miss it.

If you’re new to streaming music, it’s a good place to start. But until some more-compelling features are introduced, it’s hard to see iTunes Radio giving Apple as big a piece of the streaming music world as it has of downloads.