Beats Music in USA gestartet mit kostenloser Radiokomponente

Walt Mossberg hat den neuen Streaminganbieter Beats Music eine Woche lang getestet:

I’ve been testing Beats Music for about a week on an iPhone, and I really like it. I found that its human curation — from Beats’ own editors and a wide variety of outside curators, like music magazines such as Mojo, DownBeat, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone — offered much more satisfying playlists than other services I’ve tried. While other services have playlists from some outside curators, Beats makes them easier to find, and seems to me to make better use of them than its main competitors.
That includes the well-known Spotify service, which recently made its free version less restrictive and better on mobile devices.

Von den vier Modulen von Beats Music ist das vierte das interessanteste:

The fourth — my favorite — is called The Sentence. It lets you combine a location, a mood, the people you’re with and a music genre. Then it generates an appropriate playlist. For instance: “I’m in the car, and feel like chilling out with my roommate to ’90s pop-rock.” Or, “I’m at the beach, and feel like celebrating with my friends to classic country.” There are seemingly endless possible combinations.
For The Sentence, the company explains that the that the content, and the filters, are selected and tuned by humans, and an algorithm generates the playlist from your choices.

Entgegen der ursprünglichen Ansage, dass es keine kostenfreie Komponente von Beats Music geben würde, kann "The Sentence" kostenfrei in der iPhone-App genutzt werden. In der kostenfreien Variante lassen sich nur fünf Songs überspringen. Es dürfte damit nicht nur von der Funktionsweise sondern auch vom Lizenzmodell nah beim Onlineradio Pandora liegen.