The iTunes Radio announcement was one of the first things discussed during Apple’s keynote today, but Tim Cook ran over it so fast, I think you can still see tire tread on its back.
What should have been one of the more interesting services announcement for Cupertino was largely ignored. Apple created the online music sales market as we know it today, yet even with that legacy, very little was said about iTUnes Radio. With a nod and a collective shrug, we just took it for granted before moving on to hardware announcements.
Simply billed as “coming soon” on the official iTunes site, Radio will be another streaming service designed to compete with offerings from Pandora, Spotify, Google, and even Microsoft. It will allow you to build “stations” for your favorite music, and those stations will be synced across all of your devices via iCloud, so iPhones, iPads, and Apple TV can all get in on the act.
On a personal note, it’s a little shocking that even Microsoft was able to beat Apple to a service like this. Plus, it’s uncharacteristically tame of Apple not to work being late into more of a consumer oriented selling point. In the past being late to a service, Apple would’ve boldly claimed that they waited to perfect the offerings which were obviously inferior or confusing to consumers. There was no such bravado on display here today, and lacking that confidence is a dangerous place for Apple to be in this viscerally competitive market.
