T-Mobile Unveils Unlimited Music Streaming and unRadio
by Joshua Ho on June 18, 2014 10:00 PM EST
T-Mobile has been a significant disruptor in the US operator business as of late with John Legere at the helm. Previously, they’ve gotten rid of contracts, introduced free global roaming, six month upgrade plans, and now, unlimited music streaming for Simple Choice customers. This means that services like iHeartRadio, Pandora, Rhapsody, iTunes, Slacker Radio, and Spotify no longer count against the data cap that is in place. This is in addition to T-Mobile endorsed music services such as Samsung’s Milk Music and Beatport from SFX. T-Mobile is also offering the ability to vote for additional music services at www.t-mobilemusicfreedom.com.
In addition to unlimited music streaming, T-Mobile is announcing their own music streaming service called unRadio by partnering with Rhapsody. This is an internet radio service that allows unlimited skipping, no ads, custom radio stations, and the ability to save songs to listen to later, even without a data connection. T-Mobile is also advertising the ability to stream from thousands of terrestrial radio stations. Finally, unRadio will come with its own TrackMatch feature that can identify songs similar to Shazam or SoundHound, and allow you to create a station with that song or save it for later listening. This service will be free for those on Simple Choice plans with unlimited data, and 4 dollars a month for all other T-Mobile US customers.
All of these will definitely require a great deal of backhaul to support massive amounts of music streaming, and T-Mobile seems to be confident that they can pull it off. Judging by their large lead over all the other major national network operators, T-Mobile should have the backhaul to pull it off, especially in markets where they're deploying 20 MHz LTE.
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jjj - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
Funny,the biggest news of the day was missed by everybody so far.The Samsung Galaxy S5 LTE-A launched in Korea is using the Gobi 9x35 , so yay! 20nm in volume is here. Sure, not a GPU or a SoC but it's a chip with relevant volume.
skiboysteve - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
If Xbox music was included I would switch to t mobileGunbuster - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
Vote here: http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming...JeffFlanagan - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
A friend was just telling me how terrible Xbox Music is, and how it refuses to play music saying he doesn't own the music. Maybe you should just switch to Spotify instead of expecting tmobile to cater to a poor quality fringe music service.skiboysteve - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
Ive been using Xbox Music and before that, Zune, for many years and have had a great experience. One example of someone having a bad experience isn't any way to draw conclusions on things. I can write an example here about "my friend" who had a bad Spotify experience and how that makes Spotify "poor quality" if you like.ratbert1 - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
I live in an area where Verizon has XLTE. T-Mo is 3g in town, but go very far and it is 2g.nathanddrews - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
What about AT podcasts??!?mike8675309 - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
I love what T-mobile is doing in the marketplace but claiming to provide free data for "unlimited" music streaming seems like a real challenge. Is there some network level data that identifies a "music" stream?DanNeely - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
The stream comes from a server belonging to one of the handful of music providers that are supported. eg Your home server isn't on their white list, so you'd still pay to stream from it...NARC4457 - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
They are probably co-located servers in a T-Mobile data center