Apple is gunning for the music market again, and with Itunes Radio, a free streaming music app, they’re liable to kill the fledgling pandora, which is already struggling to make money.
Itunes radio allows for stations by artist, topic, etc. You can build your own stations, and stations seem to have more of a focus than those of Pandora. For example, one demonstrated station was “Top Trending Songs on Twitter”. Apple even went as far as to offer iTunes Radio cross-platform, which they rarely do. It can be downloaded on iOS, Mac, and Windows via iTunes.
Like Pandora, iTunes Radio is ad-supported, but Apple has the advantage of preinstalling their apps on millions of devices.
Even the interface is similar. When Pandora reacts to this blatant competitive move, we’ll update this post. The only thing we’re left wondering for today is whether this violates any of their intellectual property (i.e patents).