This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Digital
Updated Spotify Radio reaches the iPhone
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 20 June 2012
Spotify is updating its iPhone and iPad app so that the revamped ‘radio feature’, added to the desktop version of the streaming music platform last December, is available via Apple mobile devices.
Spotify Radio is a Pandora-style service, where users pick an artist they like and are then given a continuous selection of tracks from related artists. Some reckon this kind of service actually has more mainstream potential than the fully on-demand functionality offered by the main part of Spotify, and in the UK We7 stripped back its ad-funded free-to-use platform to only feature personalised radio.
In the US, this part of the Spotify offer competes more directly with Pandora, one the most established digital music services in America. And with 70% of Pandora’s listening now done on portable devices – where users are probably less able or interested in regularly returning to a platform’s catalogue to choose tracks – news that Spotify was stepping up its radio channel on mobile was enough to cause its rival’s share price to wobble.
That said, Spotify Radio is actually a pretty poor imitation of Pandora. When I used it recently (via the desktop app) I found that the same tracks started to loop within an hour, and there is no obvious way to stop certain artists or tracks from being played (though apparently quick-skips are noted behind the scenes).
Also Spotify’s cataloguing weaknesses meant that while the service correctly identified that New York band Friends were similar to my artist of choices, it couldn’t then distinguish between them and a God awful Swedish Eurovision group with the same name. And boy did it want to play their Europop shite a lot. So, despite Spotify Radio coming to the iPhone, Pandora is probably safe; at least until Spotify Radio v.3 reaches desktops and devices.
