Apple has unveiled its new streaming music discovery service, called iTunes Radio. Experts were originally speculating it would be “iRadio.”
Its engineers designed a set of featured stations, and the service can show songs that are trending on Twitter, executives said at Apple’s developer conference today.
The Pandora-like service can create stations based on a single song in order to play songs that are likely to be in line with your tastes. It also allows the user to skip songs, by skipping forward.
Wall Street analysts believe the service is a competitor to streaming music services like Pandora, Spotify and Slacker.
The iTunes Radio service keeps track of all the songs you listen to across all Apple devices, and you can preview and buy tracks from iTunes. It works on iOS, Mac and Apple TV.
The service is a free ad-supported model by itself and also is also ad-free for iTunes Match subscribers.
Apple says iTunes Radio will launch later this year.
