Get music in new ways
IHeart app expands its offerings,
You’re in the car or out somewhere listening to an unfamiliar song on live radio and wish you could immediately add the track to your own music collection. That’s the very feature at the heart of the two new streaming subscription offerings that launch in beta today from iHeartMedia: iHeartRadio Plus and iHeartRadio All Access.
I was given brief access to these offerings ahead of launch. For a start, you’re listening to live radio via the iHeartRadio app, which the company says has over 1 billion downloads, piped through your car’s stereo or straight from the app.
As a subscriber under the $4.99 a month iHeartRadio Plus plan, you can tap a “replay” button to play back any of the three most recent songs you’ve heard on a radio station since opening the app.
When you stop listening to the replay, you’re brought back to iHeart’s live streamed radio.
The second feature, arguably a bigger deal, is the ability to press a “save button” that lets you instantly add songs you hear on the radio to a My Music playlist where you can play them back at any time.
I should point out that when you press replay or save you’ll hear the song in question from the beginning and without any deejay chatter you may have heard on the radio station. In that sense, don’t think of the new service as DVR for radio.
And you can only replay or save songs, not talk radio or sports, though there are podcasts within iHeartRadio.
Plus subscribers also get to skip through the custom Pandora-like radio stations you’re listening to inside iHeartRadio without any limits.
If you step up to the $9.99 a month All Access plan, you get added benefits, notably on-demand access to a Spotify-like library with millions of tracks.
The folks at iHeart aren’t saying just how many songs they have in their catalog, but claim to have the same tracks you’d find on Spotify, Apple Music or other digital services.
Incidentally iHeartRadio All Access is powered on the backend by a familiar name in digital music, Napster.
All Access subscribers also get to create and curate additional playlists, and can listen to music and podcasts offline.
The beta app will be available on iOS and Android devices; desktop and mobile PC versions come with the full launch in January. And yes, there will continue to be a standard free iHeartRadio app without the latest bells and whistles.
During my brief time with the beta, I ran into a few glitches, notably a handful of songs that I was unable to save or replay. Oddly, I couldn’t save Adele’s Rolling
In The Deep directly from live radio but I was able to add it as an All Access user to my playlist.
Though I didn’t have time for an exhaustive search, I was not able to save any of the classical pieces I heard playing off live radio either, quite possibly because the stations I heard were not iHeartMedia-owned.
Indeed, at least during this beta period, you can only save or replay songs you hear on the 850 or so iHeartMedia-owned broadcast stations across 150 U.S. markets, as well as custom stations seeded around an artist or genre.
iHeart hopes to open the feature up next year to at least some of the thousands of non-iHeart owned radio stations that are also available through the iHeartRadio app. Right now anyway, you cannot tell though through the app which stations are iHeart-owned and which are not. One basic feature is missing in the beta: The ability to play back songs you’ve saved in shuffle or random order. I’m told it will be available during the formal launch. The save and replay feature adds are certainly niceties for those times that you hear a new song on the radio but don’t have the time or the ability right then and there to go through the hoops required to purchase or stream it on demand, or even learn what it is. That said, I’d want to see — or rather hear — a lot more before even considering ditching Spotify or Apple Music for these guys. For their part, the folks at iHeart aren’t so much looking to steal customers away from such rivals, which is likely a fruitless exercise anyway. Instead they’re targeting the 84% of iHeartRadio customers who don’t currently subscribe to an on-demand service and for whom radio remains the number one way to discover new music. In fact, the company points out that 10 times more Americans listen to radio every month than use a subscription service. In the highly competitive world of digital music, that clearly suggests an opportunity.
The beta app will be available on iOS and Android devices; desktop and mobile PC versions come with the full launch in January.