At this point, the magic 8-ball is turning up “Yes” to the question whether or not Apple will announce their new streaming music service, iRadio, at next week’s WWDC keynote at a rate of almost 100%. A new report not only confirms the magic 8-ball’s whisperings, it says Apple is restructuring the iAds team to help support the new product. But don’t expect iRadio to launch at WWDC: you’ll have to wait until iOS 7 lands in September.
According to BusinessWeek, Apple is reportedly restructuring and redirecting talent from its iAd business to support iRadio. The reason Apple is doing this is because iRadio is a Pandora-style service, supported largely by ads for free music listening (although, of course, iTunes downloads of the songs being played are only a tap away). By using their own iAd team, Apple will be able to help businesses build campaigns around the iRadio service.
While iRadio looks like a certainty for WWDC, though, it won’t launch there. Not only are not all of the deals in place, but iRadio will require deeper integration than Apple just throwing up a new app on the App Store, so it’s widescale release will have to wait until the launch of iOS 7 in the fall. Fingers crossed that developers with access to the iOS 7 beta will get to play with it a little earlier.
Source: Businessweek
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
5 responses to “iRadio Won’t Launch Until Fall, Be Supported By iAds”
Unless you can confirm that details such as these are true, you need to indicate that it’s just a rumour in the headline.
I hope this comes out before fall.
My 2gb data plan and I don’t care.
I want to see Apple strike a deal with providers and make iRadio not count against your data plan. While I am dreaming, just toss iTunes downloads and Match in there as well.
Assuming this is real I think the issue is if the betas will reveal all. It makes the most sense for this to launch at the traditional fall music event but if the betas will tell then they will announce it before some developer can