Apple’s iPod Touch. Getty Images/Justin Sullivan
Having struck a deal with Warner Music Group on June 2, Apple reignited talk of its to-be-released iRadio service at the Worldwide Developers Conference to begin June 10. While Apple has been making deals with music labels including Universal Music and Sony, it seeks advantageous licensing agreements with music publishers for its pending streaming product, and it will need all the advantages it can get. The company will launch a music streaming service into a market already rife with popular products that do nearly exactly the same thing.
Twitter’s music service launched in April, and the social network updated the service on May 31, improving charts and categorizing features. Google’s recently released Play Music All Access service is coming to iOS-based devices in a few weeks – threatening a future market for Apple with music streaming on its own devices with its own software. But more importantly, Pandora, Spotify, Songza, and Amazon Cloud Player applications have all been in the online streaming music market for years, and have rolled out their applications for mobile devices. So, what does Apple think is going to lure users to iRadio?
Reports note that iRadio would let users rewind a song and buy it off their mobile devices – two features unavailable with Pandora, which has 70 million users. (To compare, Spotify has 6 million.) But alternative features aside – neither of which is that dazzling — Apple has one leg up no internet radio service startup has ever had: 500 million iTunes users. This massive iTunes user base is the mine in which Apple could find its key to iRadio’s success, depending on how the company integrates its new streaming service with its existing subscriber music store.
Combine the hordes of potential users Apple has lined up with advertising share deals rumored to be sweeter for publishers than other internet radio services’ and Apple could have a winner. But as those 500 million iTunes users have had to spread their loyalties elsewhere for internet-based music services, they could prove resistant to wrangling, leaving the music streaming market still anyone’s game.
