What Is The Biggest Opportunity For iTunes Radio?
As iTunes Radio is launches this Wednesday, September 18th, what is it's biggest opportunity? Kyle Bylin, a user researcher at Live Nation Labs and former Hypebot editor, recently conducted a Sidewinder survey about iTunes Radio. We've gathered together some of the outstanding comments regarding the future of Apple and iTunes Radio.
In addition, take a look at this earlier interview with Jason Herskowitz by Kyle Bylin regarding mainstream consumers and iTunes Radio.
Respondents were asked what they considered the biggest opportunity for iTunes Radio.
What Is The Biggest Opportunity for iTunes Radio?
"The opportunity here is bundling listening with sales. With all other products, it's a disruptive experience to go from streaming to buying. Since Apple has a music store built in, iRadio could help increase music sales. This should be the focus for Apple: Transitioning music listeners to music buyers."
— Anon
"In-dash iOS"
— Lucas Gonze
"The biggest thing no one is talking about are podcasts. Apple completely owns the podcast market and incorporating these into a more old school service could be trivial."
— Chase Farmer
"The biggest opportunity comes from advertising. They sit on a huge database of information, and they can target the hell out of iAds. iTunes radio will just be an extension of that. In the short term the idea is to boost sales of MP3s by creating radio stations that people are most likely to love. Once people stop downloading MP3s thanks to ubiquitous connectivity (in maybe 5 years time, Apple will hope to have a dominant role in online radio, generating revenue from advertising and probably eventually from a paid subscription model like Spotify."
— Tony Hymes, Whyd
"Move away from labels and start to embrace independents. See the idea of music culture for branding as the future as opposed to large personalities and record labels which currently dominate. Personalisation also will be essential."
— Enda McGuinness
"The biggest opportunity is drawing as many of those 600 million iOS users as possible into iTunes Radio. To do this, it has to be easy to use and provide a great listening experience based on individual fan music preferences. There are still plenty of people who aren't familiar with streaming radio, so one of Apple's signature ad campaigns/TV spots should be in order to educate how iTunes Radio will improve lives."
— Wes Davenport, Wes Davenport Marketing
"Alongside Maps, iTunes Radio is Apple's lever into the car. Frankly, it just needs to be better than Pandora."
— C.Y. Lee, xDJs
"Offer a detailed personalization depending on music you bought in the past. Putting the focus on selling downloads, that would also mean a deeply discounted rate for royalties within radio."
— Claudio Gallo, StereoMood / Bad Panda Records
"It's all about developing an onboarding and retention process for Apple's ad exchange, which will be able to hypertarget users on behalf of advertisers."
— Aram Sinnreich, Rutgers University
[Thumbnail image courtesy Horia Varlan.]
More: iTunes Radio Launching This Week, Can Apple Convince Mainstream Consumers To Switch?
