iTunes Radio vs. Pandora

With the release of the iPod and iTunes, Apple dominated the market for digital music purchase and downloading. In a few years, consumers were tired of paying for music and instead searched for free downloading opportunities. Included in this movement was the establishment of free music streaming websites, especially for those who felt too guilty to illegally download mp3 files. Websites like Pandora and Spotify cropped up around the Internet for people who want to listen to a general genre of music, but do not feel like picking a specific song. In order to respond to this phenomenon, Apple created their own form of music streaming – iTunes radio.

As of March 2014, Pandora remained at the top of the most popular music streaming websites, followed by iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, and finally Spotify. Both Pandora and iTunes Radio offer free options as well as a premium paid subscription. While iTunes radio is mainly a platform for Apple products and Windows, Pandora can be run on all the Apple operating systems, Windows, Android, and Blackberry and has a wider global reach by two countries.

In terms of the diversity of artists, it is known that Apple has made deals with the three majors U.S. record labels – Sony, Warner, and Universal. As of 2013, Pandora boasts having 1 million songs from more than 100,000 different artists. Pandora does not appear to have deals with any of the record labels, but as long as it pays the standard Internet radio royalty fee, it can play whatever music it likes. Basically, it is still too early to tell which service will provide the deeper catalog.

The way Pandora selects which music to play is through what they call The Music Genome Project, which requires that every song that Pandora plays is passed by a pair of human ears and tagged based on musical attributes. This process links songs across genres, eras, and artists. For example, this classification will take the song “Keep Your Head Up” by Andy Grammer and will match it with other songs that feature “pop rock qualities, a subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation and acoustic rhythm piano.” The results that Pandora provides are difficult to duplicate and the unique blend of songs keeps users interested.

What Apple lacks in employed musicologists it makes up for in the crushing scale of its data collection. Through iTunes, Apple uses the buying and listening habits of users to create its own effective suggestion algorithm. The technique has already worked quite well with iTunes Genius Playlists and Genius Mixes.

Pandora is my go-to music streaming site. Several of my friends prefer Spotify because they can create playlists of music they don’t own. Only one of my friends really uses iTunes Radio, and that’s just in the shower. I favor Pandora because I like the randomness and diversity that it offers. It allows me to select a mood or style of music and leave it at that. Spotify needs the listener to know what they want to listen to already. The genius of The Music Genome Project allows me to listen to similar styles of music across a wide variety of genres and eras, which interests me and expands my music library.