Recently, we ran a new story about the
folding of iTunes Radio into the paid Apple Music service that caused confusion among some readers, and in hindsight its easy to guess why -- there is widespread confusion (particularly outside the two countries that ever had iTunes Radio, the US and Australia) about that it actually is, and what it isn't. This Pointers column will thus take a look at the various different audio services under the iTunes roof, what's free, what's not, what's changing, and what isn't -- and most importantly, what features are being seriously underused.
For those who never had it or never used it, iTunes Radio was an addition to the collection of Internet streams that iTunes had always offered. Starting in 2013, users in the US and later Australia could create "stations" of music by picking an artist, song, genre, or playlist of stuff they liked, and the "station" (that is to say, an endless self-generating playlist) would add songs from those artists and others related to that style or other elements using an algorithm. So, for example, if you created a "station" focused around David Bowie, you'd be likely to hear some of the work of Brian Eno, Talking Heads, or Robert Fripp and others as well.
iTunes Radio in iTunes 12
Internet Radio is not iTunes Radio
Some readers believed that our story meant that Internet Radio -- the collection of internet-based "radio" stations (many were actual broadcast radio stations, some were available online only) -- was being made part of the for-pay subscription service. This is not the case. Apple wouldn't have the rights to do this even if it wanted to, and it doesn't. The collection of Internet streams -- originally uneditable, but that changed quickly -- was and remains part of the core iTunes program and isn't the same thing as iTunes Radio, which is moving from being ad-supported to part of the paid Apple Music service (and thus dropping the ads).
If you happen to be surfing the web and come across a radio station's homepage, or a site that offers streaming audio, chances are they will have a "listen live" button somewhere. Click that, and very often (but not universally always) iTunes will launch to play the stream. It also adds that stream to the "Internet Radio" collection, which consists mostly of stations originally populated by Apple, so you can come back to play the live stream again without having to find the page you originally went to.
The tiniest of samples of one genre of Internet Radio
The collection as a whole is divided up into genres, and there are generally hundreds of stations in each genre, so there's plenty to explore even if you think you only like one particular genre of music. It's not just Top 40 or rock, either -- all kinds of genres are represented, from classical to world music. Once you find a station you like, either from the existing collection or one that you added, you can start it playing and then "hide" iTunes and get on with whatever else you're doing on the computer, with the music continuing to play (and controllable by right-clicking the iTunes icon in the dock).
Wednesday's Pointers will show you exactly how to add nearly any streaming radio station to the iTunes collection and how to find it again on demand and more, but for now just click around on a few stations you'll find, first by clicking on the "radio tower" icon on the left top side of iTunes 12, then exploring the amazing amount of stations and the music they play, broadcasting from all over the world and playing nearly any type of music you can think of.
So what is iTunes Radio?
When iTunes Radio came along in iTunes 11.1 for US and later Australian users, it did not replace the Internet Radio collection; it was a second service that offered two types of "stations" -- pre-set ones created by Apple that covered basic genres and other interests, and the ability to create your own "stations" based on songs or artists or genres you picked. If you've ever used the US service Pandora, the self-created stations were very similar; you seeded the station with music you knew you liked, and the algorithm would find what it thought was complementary music.
Some of my custom stations under iTunes 11
As with Pandora, you could tell the "station" that you especially liked a particular song and wanted it to be played again at some point, and that the artist or style appealed to you, and you could "downvote" a song to tell the algorithm it had made a poor choice. You could also "skip" a certain number of songs per hour, and would occasionally hear audio ads (later this changed to iAd-based visual ads).
Some of the preset stations in iTunes Radio
We wrote
a previous Pointers column about
how to create your own "stations" in iTunes Radio, and updated it when iTunes 12.2 came along
and changed some of the rules. In the later incarnation, creating a "station" became easier, but it was more dependent on you "rating" stuff during the first few days for it to fine-tune the selections down to a sure-fire run of new and familiar songs you'd almost always enjoy.
Creating a new custom station based on a song
It worked pretty well, actually, if you did your part and rated stuff frequently -- after a short while it "figured you out" and you didn't need to do that anywhere near as often -- but it still had a big problem: the reason iTunes Radio was free was because it was ad-supported. Those ads
always broke the spell the fine-tuned music selections were weaving. They weren't obnoxious, they just never fit into the mix. Those who purchased iTunes Match, however, never heard the ads -- a side benefit of the main purpose of iTunes Match, which was to backup your entire music collection to the cloud so you could access it anywhere.
Rating iTunes Radio songs right from the miniplayer
A few words about iTunes Match
Apple's iTunes Match service, which it still offers for $25 per year, wasn't about radio except for allowing members to skip songs on iTunes Radio more often and eliminate the ads, but it was about streaming music. It was and is a great idea -- making your entire music collection available through streaming meant you didn't need to carry much or any of your music on the limited storage of your mobile device -- and it was originally limited to 25,000 songs not purchased from iTunes (and unlimited songs if you bought them from iTunes). Recently, Apple has upped the limit to 100,000 songs and unlimited iTunes song purchases.
What's more, and we've never met anyone else outside of
MacNN staff who knew this, but most of that $25 per year actually went to artists (well, the copyright holders, who in turn paid a portion to performers and songwriters). This is because even though you already paid for and owned the music used, Apple's method of making the songs available instantly -- simply "matching" songs it could identify from your library or purchase history with the iTunes version -- meant it was streaming songs, which is technically a "performance" (in the sense of a radio or Internet broadcast), so royalties were due.
Streaming -- whether it's iTunes Match, Apple Music, Spotify, or anyone else -- pays a pittance, but for artists whose work gets streamed a lot, it starts to add up. There's a wide debate about the low price streamers pay compared to what artists get if you bought the CD, or even the album on iTunes. Apple tends to pay the most of the big services, but this is relative -- it's not a lot more than the others pay, just a bit more. If you really want to support a particular artist, buy the CD in a store as well as listening to it through streaming services. Think of it as a hardcopy backup if you must.
Let's review: there's Internet Radio built into iTunes on the Mac (not Music on iOS), and it is (and remains) free of charge. There's iTunes Radio, which was only available to the US and Australia but was free (but showed/played ads, on both OS X and iOS). It will now join the paid Apple Music service, but will lose the ads and go worldwide, which makes more sense to us.
Then there's iTunes Match, a service that costs $25 per year and stores your entire collection of music in the cloud, or nearly so -- if you own more than 100,000 songs, it would take you a thousand days (1,041 and two-thirds days, actually) of listening for eight hours a day with no breaks before you would hear a repeat, and again that 100,000-song limit doesn't count iTunes purchases. You can access your collection from anywhere with an Internet collection, but only you can access it, on all your devices, by signing into your iTunes account.
Apple Music, and where things start to get complicated
So as of last June, Apple launched the paid music service called Apple Music. The short version is that for $10 a month (or $15 per month for a household), you could stream not just any song in your own library, but any song in the iTunes Music Library -- that's 30 million songs, or nearly everything that's available to buy in the iTunes Store. Like iTunes Match, Apple Music could put your entire library of songs in the cloud, and what's more you could download anything from the iTunes Music Library for local storage and offline listening -- as long as you're still a subscriber.
If this sounds like it overlaps some of what iTunes Match does, you're right -- it does. Furthermore, when Apple Music originally launched, some people were still current or former users of iTunes Match, and apparently someone at Apple hadn't reckoned on that possibility. Among other problems with the initial launch, this fact caused what could understatedly be described as the worst sort of disastrous music fubar in the history of Apple, if not the world. In short, iTunes would get confused about your local song library, and change tags and descriptions, and sometimes even outright replace your music with something else -- or nothing, effectively deleting some of it.
If you're reading this, you are probably a big music fan, and perhaps one of those who has meticulously organized your collection. Imagine some thief in the night coming and messing with nearly everything in your record bins, and that panic attack you're having now is exactly what happened to early adopters of Apple Music (particularly, we found, those who had ever had or were currently using iTunes Match, but in some cases it even affected those who had no history with that stuff).
Despite this -- and we're
still finding songs with switched artwork even all these months later -- the actual "giant streaming library like Spotify" part of Apple Music we actually love. It's hard to forgive Apple that episode of disrespecting our own local library's integrity, but Apple Music actually being pretty terrific makes us sigh, reorganize our own music, and trust that they've learned their lesson. We hope. Did we mention that we are really enjoying Apple Music as a paid service?
Is Apple Music better than Spotify or some of the other services? Yes and no. It has one of the largest libraries, the "For You" recommendations and human-curated playlists are fantastic, it's worldwide, and its integrated into your systems. On the other hand, it launched like a cow out of a catapult, treated early adopters' local libraries like ruffians beating up bystanders, and let's face it -- Sir Jonathan Ive's first attempt at redesigning Music (for iOS) and iTunes (for Mac) was a bit of -- well, a first attempt. Even forgiving this because it will likely get better, we think Apple Music is slightly better than the rest, but only slightly.
This new reorganization means that iTunes Match users (who aren't also Apple Music subscribers) lose one of the (admittedly side) benefits, and those who don't subscribe to anything iTunes-y now get only the previous list of Internet Radio stations (which, to be fair, is hundreds) and one Apple-provided one -- Beats 1, the flagship station that is free to all iTunes users. You cheapskates still get tons of free streaming music, just not quite as many options as before.
Those who subscribe to Apple Music already have all the music they can possibly consume and then some, but are gaining some pre-set, and now ad-free, genre radio stations -- because you need more Disney Princess Radio in your life, or love to have NPR wherever you are, or previously made custom stations you can continue to enjoy as you did before. As for you iTunes Match users -- as of this writing it's not clear what changes. We'll try to clarify that, but maybe we'll all just have to find out together on January 29, when the modifications roll out in what will presumably be a new iTunes and Music version.
Until all this jazz shakes out, we're just going to have to rock and roll with these ch-ch-ch-changes. As Bowie would never, ever have stooped so low to have said.
-- Charles Martin