Kahney's Korner: Why Beats 1 radio is great for music

Hello, I'm Leander Caney. I'm the editor and publisher of CultOfMac.com, and this is another edition of Caney's Corner

Of all the announcements at this week's WWDC, the thing I was most excited about wasn't the new watchOS or iPad multitasking

It's Beats 1, the new radio station from the Apple Music Service, which is going to be launching at the end of June

So the reason I'm excited about Beats 1 is because as an expat English person living in California, I listen to Radio 1 in London all the time

I like to keep in touch with Britain's great musical culture, and the way I do that is by listening to the radio from London streaming over the internet

The ridiculous thing is that BBC Radio 1 was probably the one of the, if not the great thing about, the only great thing about growing up in the UK in the 70s

In fact, it was. It was like a ferment for the great British musical culture

It not only fed it, I think it probably helped create it

The great thing about the BBC is that it's taxpayer funded. It's paid for with British taxpayer money, so that it's not beholden to commercial interests

They're not there to please advertisers or other paymasters. There are a lot of compromises and there's a lot of things wrong with it, but one of the great things about the BBC is that it does serve its viewers and its listeners

I can attest that BBC Radio has always been great. The reason I'm excited about Beats 1 is that it sounds kind of like Radio 1, except instead of the British taxpayer, you've got Apple, and hopefully with their billions of dollars in their deep pockets

they're going to fund a listener-centric, a listener-friendly radio station, a global radio station, staffed with some great talent

Zane Lowe is a great star. And they're not going to be beholden to the commercial interests that I think have ruined a lot of terrestrial radio and online streaming services

It won't be run by robots, it'll be run by real DJs who are passionate about music, and it won't be in service of a radio playlist

It'll be for listeners, hopefully. It's ironic in this age of streaming audio, the way you can get almost any song at any time, that the best way to hear music, the best way to discover new music, is the old-fashioned way, with a radio DJ

And I love a good radio DJ, so I have very, very high hopes for this

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