iHeartRadio Review
by Alan Wallace
As Pandora and iHeartRadio radio continue their online battle, IHeartRadio has introduced its new beta (iheartradio.com). Currently, IHeartRadio.com features 750+ stations from 150 Cities that can be located by Zip, State and/or Format. You can try the new beta by clicking on the ?Try It Now? link and connect via Facebook. The beta allows you to listen to over 800 ?Live? radio stations or build your own station by artist or around a song with over 11 million to choose from.
Pandora still seems to show that they have a bit more experience in providing custom stations and features I do like include seeing why Pandora can explain by song why it is being suggested. But what I love about iHeart is something that Pandora will not be able to do - provide me both options of custom and traditional radio for when I want to listen to KFI, WSIX or KTU.
The new IHeartRadio.com lets you:
? Share your favorite stations including the custom stations that you build on Facebook, Twitter (or by link)
? Purchase songs via ITUNES (Pandora links to iTunes and Amazon)
? View Song Lyrics (including writer and publisher info) (Pandora provides this also and also allows you to email the lyrics to a friend)
? Review your listen history and ?Likes?.
Account Settings - Return to the last station listened to when you log back in. Parents can also restrict explicit content which may be available on Custom Radio to those under the age of 13. Doing so will disable the custom radio option.
As part of the installation you are asked to connect to Facebook which requests the following:
- Access my basic information
Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.
Send me email
iHeartRadio may email me directly at alan.wallace@
Publish games and app activity
iHeartRadio may publish scores, achievements, and other activity to Facebook.
Access my profile information
Likes, Music, TV, Movies, Books, Quotes
Once "Liked", iHeartRadio.com (BETA) begins by suggesting radio stations in my area while also providing the option to build my own custom station. Selecting some of my favorite artists, I saw my new custom station populated with great songs and with the Facebook integration - I'm able to comment about them.
Clicking on the friends tab also allows me to see what my friends are listening to so next I'm off to see what Guy Zapoleon, Kurt Hanson, John Gehron, Bill Sobel, Tom Poleman are listening to.
What do I hope is in the future for iHeartRadio focuses next on mobile?
? I would like to be able to link my apps and web ? so I can have all my favorites and custom stations are available everywhere.
? I would also like the mobile apps to work for both portrait and landscape so when I place my phone in the cradle or rotate my iPad - I don?t have to lean sideways to read the screen.
Alan Wallace
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(9/9/2011 5:38:42 AM)
I like the idea, but I have to wonder...they say there are 11 million cuts in their library. Are there really that many songs out there? 11,000,000? Really?
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