Two pieces of news out today related to the music streaming biz: Recode is reporting that Amazon is talking to music labels about a music streaming service that could be bundled with Prime subscriptions, while Pandora has announced it has grown to 250 million users in the US.
If Amazon is able to make deals with the music labels, Recode speculates that it could offer music streaming through its Prime subscriptions which currently only offers movies and TV shows as well as free two-day shipping for $79/ year. The report notes, however, that Amazon is running into some roadblocks with cutting deals:
Which doesn’t mean it will: One label source reports that Amazon isn’t close to getting a deal done, because its executives are asking for a substantial discount on the pricing the labels have given to other services, like Spotify, Rhapsody and Beats… Still, label talks have been going on for the past few months, sources say.
As for Pandora, that’s up from around 200 million users back in April of last year and since the launch of one of its biggest new competitors, Apple’s iTunes Radio, in September. Pandora also noted that “Listeners have now created over six billion stations.”
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I like iTunes Radio, but have found Pandora to be better at picking similar songs. It seems like iTunes Radio pays more attention to the artist then the song. I have noticed this when creating a station from a song that is different from an artist’s majority of their work. Pandora seems to pick songs that share common traits with the song while iTunes Radio seems to pick other songs from the artist, despite not really sounding like the song, and other artist who are similar to the artist’s primary style.
Personally, I think that Apple missed the boat with iTunes Radio. Doing a me-too of Pandora misses the leveraging of their substantial iTunes store and past purchases. Something like allowing listeners to make a playlist/station with songs that they have purchased and inserting random songs into the playlist from iTunes Radio. Or something similar. It just amazed me that Apple didn’t do something with their greatest asset, something that Pandora nor Spotify or others could really match.
I have Pandora, myself, and after having tried iTunes Radio, I think that its good, but Pandora chooses better songs, hands down. I used iTunes Radio for a month, in order to see if it learned my likes as well as Pandora. It did not. It was ok, but its simply not at the same level.
I highly recommend that if you get Pandora, you pay $3.99 a month for no ads, better sound quality, and more skips. Its totally worth it.