Apple Near Deal For Radio Service 143
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.'"
Re:Apple apple apple... (Score:2, Interesting)
An Android product would make more of a difference, what with the current approx 2:1 ratio in favour of Android usage on smartphones.
Trouble is, most folks on Android are known to loathe "paying for any software." So what they do is to pirate [idownloadblog.com].
Market leader (Score:0, Interesting)
In fanboy hype! Lead the way Apple, be different, just like pandora and spotify and last.fm and ...
Re:iTunes for Windows (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Apple apple apple... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Platform and Streaming concerns are orthogonal (Score:4, Interesting)
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.