ITunes Radio

Is iTunes Radio apart of your future? Well it sure looks like its apart of Apple's. They say at the pace that its on, it could surpass Pandora in a month with over 11 million listeners in the first few days. Until we get to that point to find out, find out now if its something you need or want. This is iTunes Radio. 

Think Pandora with the backing of iTunes. What's really cool about iTunes Radio is if an artist has a new song or new album coming out, you can hear that new song or songs from the album streaming live in its entirety on your playlist. Another thing I like is, if you hear a song you like, you can buy it right then and there. You can also tune the radio to your liking. Hit the red information button at the top and you then see a screen where you can purchase the song, create a station from that particular artist or song your listening to. Tune the station by hits of the genre, a variety or set it to discovery and get a whole slew of different songs and song types. Then you can even share it all via air drop, Twitter, Facebook, email or iMessage. The truth is there is a couple of good things to like about iTunes Radio, but again like anything else it does have its faults. 

iTunes Radio has ads. Honestly what doesn't have ads today? Not sure when photos and ads took over human life, but there it is in all its glory. The ads come on about every 4th or 5th song and they are not very long in my opinion. I listen to the smooth jazz station every night as go to sleep and the one problem that I have is that it will stop playing music and ask if I want to continue listening to music. That's a good and bad feature. If you don't answer music cuts off and saves your battery which is good. But the thing is, my iPod/iPhone is off and I am not waking up every few minutes just to answer that question. What would be nice is a auto shut off timer, so I could set it for an hour or let it play until I get up and manually shut it off in the morning. But I am sure as the service grows, so will the features. 

I think that I like the fact that every song in iTunes is available and ready to be added to your radio station based on that artist or that song. I made a radio station based on 2 Chainz. I tuned my services to hits and (even though I skipped all the songs just as a demo) most of the songs included 2 Chainz or had songs by others like him that were in a sense hits on the radio or billboard. The variety tune, gave me 2 Chainz new music off his new album and then the next song was off of Lil Wayne's newest album and the song after that gave new new music off of Drake's new album. I didn't go much further after that. While your listening to the music, you have a star button you can press and that either "play more like this", "never play this", or "add to iTunes wish list".

My Beautiful Playlist

The other features include changing the stations name to what ever you want it to be, sharing the station via email, Twitter, Facebook, and AirDrop support. I shared a link via email with my fiancé and it took her right to my "Bed Time Music" radio station on iTunes on our desktop PC. 

I really don't do a lot of music streaming. When I did, I did use Pandora and that was cool to use when I used it. As for iTunes Radio, I use this every night for bed and other than it asking me the option to keep playing or not (which is not all the time for some reason. Must be a bug) I like the service that it provides. I don't know what differences it holds over Pandora in terms of things that it does over the other. I wouldn't know what would make a person switch between Pandora to iTunes Radio, but I will say that the selection of music is better and I only skipped one song (when I was actually using the service and not demoing the service) and the option to purchase the music right inside the service was nice. I guess the only thing good I can see on it for a person to switch would be the idea of one less app to use or to have on your screen. I like the fact that when I updated to iOS 7, I did delete Pandora and I forced myself to use iTunes Radio to see if I would like it or not. So far so good and I know it should only get better. So my final opinion on this service is that it is a good service that has the potential to be great. I also think you should give it a try and you just might like it. 

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