UnRadio: Rhapsody Unwraps New Pandora Meets Spotify + Shazam Service
Proving that there's still lots of room for innovation in streaming music, Rhapsody has launched UnRadio, a 'Pandora meets subscription music plus broadcast radio' service. Starting today, this hybrid entry is free for Rhapsody subscribers, available as a separate service for $4.99 per month, and discounted or free for T-Mobile customers.
UnRadio hopes to elbow into a space between free music and full paid on-demand services by solving a problem for listeners. Pandora, Songza, Beats and others have repeated the mantra that we find 30 million track catalogs confusing and want a lean-back experience. unRadio is Rhapsody's solution to this user dilema, offering features that include:
- Unlimited stations: Thousands of curated and user-generated stations and playlists with unlimited song skips and no ads. Users can also automatically create streams based on an artist or song.
- Save songs: When users like a song, they mark and save it for future listening on-demand or as a tethered download for listening without an internet connection.
- Live streaming og global broadcast radio: Thousands of U.S. and global stations are available for play within UnRadio
- 32 million tracks: As a global music service, Rhapsody delivers its ever-expanding catalog to UnRadio
- TrackMatch: Rhapsody unRadio includes a new Shazam-like feature, TrackMatch, that can be used to identify songs users hear while going through their day, create stations around these songs or save them as favorites for later listening.
T-Mobile, UnRadio & 'Music Freedom'
Starting June 23rd, T-Mobile will make Rhapsody unRadio available at no additional charge to Simple Choice customers on its newest unlimited 4G LTE data service, and at a discounted price of $4 per month for other customers. T-Mobile also announced Music Freedom – streaming from most major services including Rhapsody, Spotify and Pandora will no longer count toward data limits on certain plans.
More: T-Mobile Drops Data Caps For Streaming Music
Is This Rhapsody's Path To Success?
Subscription music streaming is still in its infancy, and no one has come close to figuring out what might drive main stream adoption. For Spotify and others, free ad-supported music has been the easy, but likely unsustainable, path to new users. But Rhapsody has steadfastly chosen not to follow that course. If it can land more mobile partners. UnRadio could be Rhapsody's answer to paid user acquisition.
