iTunes Radio

iTunes Radio is a new attraction (as of Sept. 18, 2013) from Apple for music fans. It is accessible on:

• Apple's Mac computers via the iTunes app (version 11.1 or later)
• Windows PCs via the iTunes app (version 11.1 or later)
• Apple's mobile devices (iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches) via the Music app included in Apple's latest operating system release, iOS 7

iTunes Radio is also found on Apple's little set top box, the Apple TV, that streams entertainment into a TV set and possibly a sound system.

What iTunes Radio does is let you set up "radio stations" that play music that fits in with any artist, song, or genre you like. For example, if you set up a station based on "The Rolling Stones," you'll hear music by that group and by related performers, such as the Doors and the Allman Brothers Band.

Here are some iTunes Radio screenshots from my iPad:

Some of my "stations" that I've
set up on iTunes Radio

Playing "The Rolling Stones Radio"
on iTunes Radio

About to edit "The Rolling Stones Radio"

Adding "The Moody Blues & More"
to "The Rolling Stones Radio"

"The Moody Blues" have been
added to "The Rolling Stones Radio"

The iTunes Radio music streams to you across the Internet from a library of some 27 million songs available at Apple's iTunes Store. Apple uses smart algorithms to figure out what music you like, based on your original selection. You can refine the results by telling iTunes Radio to "Play more like this" as a particularly welcome song is playing. If the song is unwelcome you can tell iTunes Radio to "Never play this song," or for less emphatic disapproval you can just skip ahead to the next song. You get up to six song-skips per station per hour.

A neat thing: If you're using an iPhone 4S/5/5S/5C, 3rd or 4th generation iPad, iPad Mini, or 5th generation iPod Touch, you can control iTunes Radio using Siri, Apple's "intelligent personal assistant" that features voice recognition technology. You can hold down the Home button until Siri chimes, showing it's ready to obey your commands, then say things like "Play Rolling Stones Radio." Siri will tell the music app to start playing that iTunes Radio station. You can, via the Home button, summon Siri and say "I like this song," and Siri will add it to your list of favorites for the current station as if you had manually told iTunes Radio to "Play more like this." Telling Siri "Don't play this song again" mimics manually selecting "Never play this song."

Buying the Music

When iTunes Radio plays a song, you hear exactly the same recording that you can buy at the iTunes Store. In fact, iTunes Radio lets you buy any song that is currently playing with just two taps/clicks! With a couple of extra taps/clicks, you can buy the entire album. After you buy some music, it hovers in the "cloud" — specifically, it's stored on Apple's "iCloud" Internet servers. You can (after exiting iTunes Radio) play it any time you want. You can also download it to any of your devices that have onboard storage.

iTunes Radio keeps track of the history of all the songs you've played on all of your stations, and you can tell it to show you that history. No listed song can be played again in full, but you can play a sample of it and buy it if you want to.

iTunes Radio also lets you put any currently playing song, or any song listed in your history, on a wish list to be purchased later.

iTunes Radio and WiFi (and 3G/4G/LTE)

Since Apple's mobile devices and its Apple TV use WiFi, the transmission path to those devices finishes with wireless in-home delivery of the tracks being played to whatever device you're listening to. The tracks are not downloaded but streamed, which means no on-device storage is used or required. That's especially fortunate for the Apple TV, which lacks onboard storage.

iPads, iPhones, and iPods that are equipped with a wireless data capability such as 3G, 4G, or LTE can optionally receive iTunes Radio without a WiFi connection.

Ads (and How To Avoid Them)

iTunes Radio does impose occasional audio ads on you, every few tracks. For $25 a year, you can subscribe to Apple's iTunes Match, a service that lets you store your own music tracks — those that you got from some source other than Apple, that is — in Apple's iCloud, which is a phenomenally capacious online repository for all sorts of digital data. If you subscribe to iTunes Match, the iTunes Radio ads disappear.

Featured Stations

Apple also provides users with an ever-changing panoply of "featured stations." These are said to be "DJ-curated, editorial, or hybrid stations" featuring selection of music by a DJ or other human specialist, rather than by an impersonal algorithm. Among the featured stations right now are "The Beatles Radio" and "Guest DJ — Katy Perry." More "featured stations" are to come ...

A Few Words about iTunes Radio's Competition

iTunes Radio is in competition with Pandora, and also with Spotify, Rdio, and Google Play Music, all of which offer Internet streaming that can mimic "radio" playing "just the music you like," just as iTunes Radio does. Google Play Music, which debuted only recently, makes you spend $10 a month to personalize your "radio" streams, as it's mainly intended for storage and play of your previously purchased music. GPM does not yet offer an app for Apple devices; its apps are for Android devices only.

Pandora, Spotify, and Rdio are more direct iTunes Radio competitors, as they do offer apps designed for Apple devices such as the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. (An exception is the Apple TV, which offers "supported Internet media services," not apps. To use Pandora, Spotify, or Rdio directly on the Apple TV would require Apple to build it into its Apple TV software, which would undercut iTunes Radio. Ain't gonna happen. But if you have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod, you can use AirPlay to send music from the Pandora, Spotify, or Rdio app on that device over to an Apple TV. On the sending device, if it is running under the most recent iOS 7 platform, you do that via the Control Center that appears when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen.)

These competing services can outdo iTunes Radio in certain functional areas, such as sharing playlists on social media.

I like Pandora best of the three iTunes Radio competitors. It, like iTunes Radio, lets you buy its currently playing songs directly from the iTunes Store. Pandora's app is the second most downloaded iPhone free app of all time.

Spotify seems to no longer let you buy music; when it used to let you do so, it was not from the popular iTunes Store. I dislike Rdio because, after a free trial period, you have to pay $5 a month to use it at all on any mobile device. None of the other three services, though, offers iTunes Radio's seamless integration: playing "radio" stations tailored to your musical tastes, buying the "radio" music from the iTunes Store, and listening to the music you personally own ... on any and all of your Apple computers and devices.

Pandora has ads, as does iTunes Radio, but you can pay Pandora $3.99 a month or $36 a year to delete them. Spotify has fully 20 million songs in its library, where Pandora has but one million (and iTunes Radio has 27 million). Spotify will delete its ads for $9.99 a month.

Deezer, Xbox Music, Beats Music, Slacker Radio, MOG, and Grooveshark are yet other potential iTunes Radio competitors, about which I know little.

iTunes Radio's Availability

Unfortunately, iTunes Radio is as yet available only in the U.S. This limitation probably has to do with Apple not yet having licensing agreements with major record companies that permit Apple to stream their music abroad.

More on Pandora

Here's an East Bay Express article about Pandora, the Internet radio site I covered in Viva Pandora!. I'm still grooving on the sheer abundance of good music it will serve up to you, if you tell it a favorite artist or song title. I now have 34 songs stacked up in my Apple Music Store shopping cart, and I'm not even trying real hard to snag every hot lick and tuneful tour de force I hear.

Pandora ranks the over 300,000 songs in its library according to hundreds of musical "genes" identified by the Music Genome Project as constituting the best way to analyze song tracks for perhaps surprising similarities. For example, according to the article, "whether the kick drum sound is tight or booming" is one of 235 genes identified for the hip-hop/electronic genre. However, the jazz genre's "gene that counts improvised sax licks" is, obviously, not, though it is one of the total of 400 or so genes spread across those two genres and also those of rock/pop/country and world music.

I find it fascinating — and here's something you won't glean from the Pandora FAQ — that Pandora constructs a stream made up of tight, mood-similar sets. It

... builds a series of short playlists around common elements, much the way a real-life deejay puts music together into sets, first establishing one mood, then breaking it for another one ... [T]he site plays a set tightly connected to the original request in some way, then moves on to another set that's related a different way.

If I had my way, I'd ask that Pandora provide a way to quickly skip ahead not only to the next song but to the next set ... i.e., to take me to the next mood.

Viva Pandora!

Ever wished for an Internet radio station that you can really tailor to your tastes? Now there's Pandora, and you can.

The Pandora player you see the first time you visit (the snap at right is from much later in my Pandora noodling career) asks you to name an artist or song you really like. I entered "Paul McCartney." The player responded by playing a song by Sir Paul (the recent Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard track "Riding to Vanity Fair"), and then began choosing other songs that, though they may typically be by other artists, have key characteristics in common (mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, subtle use of vocal harmony, major key tonality, and prominent percussion, for instance) with songs by Macca himself.

The second song in the Pandora-generated series, "Wherever You Are" by David Mead, was by an artist I'd never heard of, but one who (at least in that song) sounded almost like a Paul clone. I liked the sound, so I gave it a thumbs up in the Pandora player. That meant Pandora would henceforth bias my "Paul McCartney Radio" playlist toward Macca-like music that was also David Mead-like.

In fact, I liked "Wherever You Are" so much, I told the Pandora player to link to it ("buy" it, supposedly) in Apple's iTunes Music Store. This kind of activity causes the iTunes app to launch if it isn't already active, while Pandora continues to play. The appropriate search criteria are automatically passed from Pandora to the Music Store search engine, and the song you want (in possibly more than one version by the artist in question) appears in the iTunes results window. From there, I could click on "buy song" mext to one of these versions to have the song I'd told Pandora I liked and wanted put in my shopping cart, ready to purchase.

But, maddeningly, the Apple Store's music library is missing some key artists almost entirely — including McCartney, and also including the Beatles and Wings. If I try to buy a missing song, iTunes simply says "Your search did not return any results" and folds its hands complacently.

Actually, I ran into some additional snags the first time I tried to "buy" a song at iTunes courtesy of Pandora, and I had to resort to some clever computer-type strategies to get things working smoothly thenceforth. But the fact that this pass-off works at all (or can fairly easily be made to work) is a bit amazing.

But not as amazing as the fact that Pandora really does know how to pick music that matches, in this instance, my taste for Paul McCartney. Or, on another "station" I set up, this one for "Outlaw Country" stars Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson — the "Highwaymen" — plus, of course, their country cousin Merle Haggard. If I wanted, I could add Jerry Jeff Walker, and his "musical genome" would influence any subsequent selections Pandora makes on that particular station.

Yes, "musical genome" is the apt phrase — not "musical genre." What is a musical genome? Well, it's something defined by the Music Genome Project under the aegis of Tim Westergren, who is also Pandora's prime mover. According to this story in my local newspaper, the project broke popular music down into 400 parameters (one is, for instance, "use of vocal harmony") which could be used to describe any given song in the repertoire.

Every song in Pandora's 300,000-song library has been rated according to all 400 parameters by music theory-trained analysts whose correct judgments are absolutely crucial to the Pandora/Music Genome concept. As far as I can tell, the analysts are spot-on every time.

So far, I'm approximately six hours into my new Pandora lifestyle, and I've created five custom-tailored stations and found 19 songs to put in my Apple Music Store shopping cart. A few of the songs are ones I've heard before but never thought to buy. Most of them are brand new to me. Many or them are by artists I've never followed ... including four artists I've not heard of before!

So, yes, finally there's a way of setting up Internet radio stations to play music you're actually gonna like, even if it's brand new to you. Check it out!

P.S. By the way, Pandora is free! Supposedly, you have to look at ads ... but for whatever reason, I've yet to see an ad. If you want to make sure you never see an ad, you can pay Pandora $36 a year of use, or $12 for a shorter, three-month subscription.