Shane Cole
A survey of more than 800 iOS device owners shows that of those who have tried Apple's new iTunes Radio, the vast majority have either returned to Pandora exclusively or continue to use the streaming service alongside Apple's offering.
The report, from investment bank Canaccord Genuity, indicates that while iTunes Radio compares favorably to Pandora's offering in fit and finish, the service lags behind in overall consumer perception thanks to poorer automated song selection.
Approximately 72 percent of consumers surveyed were running iOS 7, and about 40 percent of that group had tried iTunes Radio. Just eight percent ditched Pandora entirely for Cupertino's service, while forty-four percent split their listening time roughly equally.
When asked to quantify the "overall experience" of both services, 66 percent of respondents call their experience with iTunes Radio "positive" or "very positive," while Pandora scores 78 percent on the same metric. Apple wins with tight margins on app usability questions, but loses out to Pandora in perhaps the most important metric, "Plays songs I want to hear," 63 percent to 72 percent. 36% of those surveyed by Canaccord Genuity have never heard of iTunes Rado
Interestingly, despite Apple's aggressive marketing push for iTunes Radio, 36 percent of those who have yet to try the service say they have never even heard of it.
The report notes that the sentiment among investors is that "Pandora and iTunes Radio can peacefully coexist and together take tremendous share from broadcast radio," but that October's listener metrics will be the real test of that hypothesis. Earlier this month, Pandora CFO Mike Herring called iTunes Radio an "existential threat" to Pandora.
Apple's long-awaited entrance into the streaming music field, iTunes Radio was released in September alongside iOS 7. Cupertino revealed last week that in just over a month, more than 20 million users have tried the service and streamed more than 1 billion songs.
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
Sponsored Content
Christine McKee
Thomas Sibilly
73 Comments
Well that is definitely a reason to sell all your Apple stock. And get rid of all you iOS devices and replace them with Android ones..
If iTunes Radio didn't keep playing the same 12 songs, maybe I'd go back to iTunes radio! I loved iTunes radio but once you start playing it for over 2 hours, you hear the exact same songs that you started with. Pandora is a new experience ongoing for hours. It's like as soon as you click "play more like this" or "don't play this song" iTunes only chooses from the same small database of songs. The settings for how diverse you want your song selection is only available on iTunes on your computer, not your device, and even when you switch off the "top hits" you still get the same experience. They should have made it like siri - a long, drawn out Beta
Pandora is better, thats why
Hmmm... This smells of a report with an agenda... First, if you are going to measure adoption of iTunes Radio vs. Pandora on iOS devices, you would only survey iOS 7 users... Obviously, users of prior versions do not have access to iTunes Radio, so of course they are not going to be using it... That immediately distorts the numbers... If you only count those who are running iOS7, then it looks like over 11% of those users have ditched Pandora entirely... That is actually a pretty big number for a service that is a little over five weeks old... And well more than half of iOS7 users are at least 'splitting' their listening hours... This is very bad news for Pandora, and quite different from the headline...
Guess I'm an outlier again. I never used Pandora. Use and like iTunes Radio. Did not go back to Pandora. In the 8%. That makes me special. Or their 800 sample size is too small to be useful.