The 15 things to know about iTunes Radio

NEW music streaming service from Apple hopes to step to Spotify, Pandora and Beats. Here’s what you should know about it.

Radio gaga. The free new music streaming service from Apple hopes to muscle in on Spotify

IF YOU look at the music section on your iPhone you’ll see a new icon sitting there. This is iTunes Radio and it’s Apple’s answer to streaming music’s big guns Spotify, Pandora and Beats Music.

When was the last time you bought a music track? If you’re currently still trying to remember then you probably have been using music streaming. Music is beamed straight to your device without having to download it first and it’s now a de facto way to listen. The likes of Spotify and Pandora have dominated this area in the past couple of years now major players are getting involved.

While Spotify still offers more option in terms of creating completely custom playlists you control, when it comes to radio, where you choose a genre and through a clever algorithm it selects tracks of a similar ilk for your pleasure, enter Apple and its free iTunes Radio.

Here are 15 things you need to know about the new service:

• You don’t have to download it as it’s already on your iPhone, iPod. iPad, Mac and Apple TV right now. Overnight the app suddenly appeared on our iDevices. Asked how Apple did this and they replied “magic”.

• There are approximately 37 million tracks available

• Australia was the second country in the world after the US to get iTunes Radio

• There are ads, both audio and visual, that occasionally appear but you can go ad free by subscribing to iTunes Match (a service that uploads your whole music library to the cloud and sync across all your devices) for A$35 a year.

• It can be used via wi-fi and mobile data. Exact data figures as well as bit rate were not revealed but at an average 3 minute length you can expect each song to be around 3mb in data.

• You cannot listen to iTunes Radio offline

You can add songs to your wish list so you can buy tracks you’ve discovered later.

• If you leave your station it will remember where you left and continue playing when you go back to it

• You get six skips per station per hour

• You cannot skip back to a track once you skip forward

• You can make your own radio stations based on music style and refine it over time with options that will either play more like the one playing or never play that song again.

• Apple in-house staff and DJs curate the featured stations updating every week with topical stations. Expect over Valentine’s Day, Halloween and Christmas to find tracks to get you in the mood.

Tailored playlists will appear around world events. Here we can see one for Valentine’s Day.

• There is an option to censor explicit tracks. Just tap the info icon at the top and turn the switch to “on”

• iTunes radio will sync across all your iDevices including Apple TV so if you make a radio station on your mobile it will pop up elsewhere.

• You can ask Siri for requests by yelling “play more like this” as well as asking “what song is this” and control tracks by shouting “play” or “pause”.

• If you’ve found a station you simply must share with someone, if they have an iPhone you can air drop it over to them immediately