Michal Ždanský Apple Internet Radio has been rumored for several months. The company's possible plans were partially revealed by Beats CEO Jimmy Iovine, who spoke in an interview he spoke about the meetings with Steve Jobs, which started back in 2003, when he got the idea for the subscription. Ten years later, "iRadio," as the service is unofficially called, is about to collapse.
According to the server The Verge should the largest music publisher, Universal Music, to close a deal with Apple in the next few weeks. While the agreement with other publishers from the big four, Warner Music a Sony Music should follow not long after. Already last week informed The Verge about a fundamental breakthrough in negotiations with both companies.
iRadio should work similar to services Pandora, Spotify or Rdio. For a monthly fee, a user gets access to the service's entire music library without owning specific albums or songs, and can stream music over the Internet to their mobile device or computer. Apple's iTunes Match service already works on a very similar principle, but here the user can upload only the songs he owns to the cloud. If Apple would iRadio introduced, there would likely be some type of service merger.
According to the diary New York Post Apple's initial offer to music publishers was six cents per 100 tracks streamed, roughly half of what Pandora pays companies. After negotiating with the companies, Apple appears to have agreed to a similar amount to what Pandora is licensed for streaming songs. Given the huge song database that iTunes has (currently over 25 million songs), the existence of a subscription service poses a big threat to the existing players in the streaming music field.
Pandora or Spotify have grown mainly due to their unique position. Although Apple is the largest seller of digital music, the previous model of classical sales was recording to streaming services. For example, Pandora boasts more than 200 million subscribers, although it offers its services on several platforms and it is also possible to use a web application, but the loss of customers on Apple platforms, especially on iOS, could deal a major blow to these companies.
If Apple manages to reach an agreement with all the major recording companies in the near future, we could expect to see the service introduced at WWDC 2013, where Apple has mainly presented its software products for the past two years.
If it works like the Deezer I pay for, great. It must also go to offline mode…
won't it be a problem that Czech Radio also has iRadio (a long time ago)? :D
http://hledani.rozhlas.cz/iradio/