It’s become “increasingly clear,” following last week’s iTunes 11 launch...
It’s become “increasingly clear,” following last week’s iTunes 11 launch and “a series of industry executive meetings,” that Apple will launch an ad-supported streaming radio service in 2013, BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield said Friday at his company’s website. Greenfield…
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met with executives within the music industry, he told us, declining to identify them. “While Pandora investors may have breathed a sigh of relief when iTunes 11 did not include an iRadio service, at launch, as some had speculated, we believe Apple is laying the groundwork for such a product in the first half of 2013,” he said at the BTIG site. The radio service “appears to be a product that will materialize far sooner than some form of Apple Television product, which continues to be a work in progress,” he said. Apple’s “pursuit of the television will take longer to come to fruition than investors are likely expecting,” he predicted. ITunes 11 has made Apple’s current-generation “Radio” product “far more prominent, adding it to the horizontal feature bar that runs across the top of the screen” now, he said. “While the service underlying that Radio button is unappealing to most consumers today, we believe the radio service can easily be updated to incorporate” advanced functionality, he said. He still believes that an iRadio product is “critical for Apple to create a local advertising/commerce strategy, tying together Maps, Passbook, Siri and a new music service (which we are calling iRadio for now),” he said. Music downloading via iTunes has “slowed as Internet radio services such as Pandora grow and subscription, cloud-based music streaming services such as Spotify proliferate,” he said. “Entering the radio business gives Apple another critical tool to capture time spent in the car and the ability to learn a tremendous amount about the consumer,” he said. IRadio will be “vastly superior to Pandora because Apple is unwilling to settle for compulsory music licenses,” he said, predicting Apple will seek “direct deals with labels at premium rates enabling iRadio to offer a superior feature set including a global solution” and “extended caching so that wireless dead-zones are no longer a problem whether driving, flying or underground.” Apple didn’t immediately comment on its plans or Greenfield’s comments.