(UPDATE 2) Almost two hours into its annual Worldwide Developers Conference and after several dozen major launches and upgrades, Apple announced iTunes Radio, a Pandora-like music streaming service. Not called iRadio as rumored, iTunes Radio includes several hundred curated streams along with artist driven and user created stations.
ITunes Radio will be free and ad supported, but subscribers to Apple's cloud based music storage locker iMatch can listen ad free. All stations can be fine tuned by the user.
In a move that could be help spur Twitter #Music adoption, one iRadio station uses songs trending on the micro-blogging service to chose tracks.
Expected to launch in U.S. in the fall, as part of the new iOS 7 operating system, iTunes Radio will be available on all iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) running iOS 7, as well as, iTunes on the Mac and PC. Perhaps due to licensing issues, Apple says it will roll out iRadio in other countries later.
Apple may be later to the streaming game, but with a huge user base that includes more that 575 million registered accounts, iTunes Radio will be a formidable competitor.
You can get an advance look at what iRadio looks like along with specifics on all of it's features on the detailed page published by Apple on Monday here.
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