iTunes Radio

» see apple.com/itunes/itunes-radio as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

itunes radio was a us licensing artifact wearing apple's design language. it shipped on september 18 2013 inside ios 7 as a station-based ad-supported radio service. you picked a song or an artist, the music app spun up a station around it, and ads ran between tracks. paid itunes match users got the version without ads. it was apple's pandora answer years after pandora had already aged out, and the whole product felt like a placeholder for something else apple had not announced yet.

australia got the service in february 2014. nobody else got it as a launch market. licensing the catalog country-by-country was the bottleneck and apple did not push that bottleneck very hard, because the placeholder thesis turned out to be correct. apple music shipped on june 30 2015 and the paid tier of itunes radio rolled into it on day one. the free tier kept stumbling along for another seven months as beats 1 radio took the marketing oxygen. january 28 2016 was the date the lights went out for good.

itunes itself was on every mac and windows machine i touched between roughly 2003 and 2019, the way it was for everyone with an ipod and a music library that was half ripped from cds and half not. itunes radio was the tab that did nothing useful in turkey. it was greyed out, or it redirected to the regular store, or it played a few seconds and stopped. it sat in the version of apple's product map that never really reached me, and by the time apple music shipped i had already paid spotify for a year.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch had two design decisions worth remembering. the first was that itunes radio lived inside the music app and not as a separate app. apple was burying it inside an interface people already used so that discovery would happen passively. the second was the buy button. every station view had a price tag next to the current song, because the whole service was internally a funnel into the itunes store. the radio was free, the songs you liked were $0.99 each, and apple booked the revenue on the back end.

~ what it actually was ~

under the hood it was a station-recommendation engine licensed from the same major-label machinery that fed every other service. featured stations were curated by apple editors and felt heavy on what americans were listening to that week. you could create your own station from a seed artist and tune it with thumb-up or thumb-down feedback. none of this was novel. pandora had been doing it for a decade and last.fm had been doing it before that. what was new was apple's bet that bundling the radio into the os would crowd out the third-party clients on iphone home screens.

~ how it ended ~

the announcement was not really an announcement. apple posted a support note in late january 2016 saying the free service would end on the 28th, and that apple music subscribers would keep their stations and recommendations. that was the whole obituary. itunes radio had been quietly demoted twice already in interface updates that year. the brand name itself faded out of marketing months before the tab disappeared from the music app. it was the kind of death apple does well, where the product is gone before most people realize it was still there.

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