The third and final major music label Apple needed in order to release, or at least announce, the new iRadio has finally reached a deal with the company.
Sony is the latest to reach a deal with Appe Inc. after Universal made a similar deal earlier this week to get on board with the company's project to create a music streaming radio service for its millions of subscribers. Sony and Universal are joined by Warner Music Group to give Apple the rights to all of the popular music content that it needs to create a service similar to that of Pandora.
There was early speculation as to what kind of music streaming service Apple would provide. Some wondered if they would try to imitate the hugely successful model of Spotify.
The all-access music streaming program allows its users to listen to any song, any time as many times as they want. It's free as long as users don't mind the occasional commercial. However, if they do, they can opt to pay a small monthly fee to have the service available on their mobile devices commercial free.
iRadio, on the other hand, is expected to be more ike Pandora in that it will allow users to choose a genre of music they like and create radio stations based on that genre of music. Obviously having all access to music would negate Apple's iTunes store, which currently acts as the best place to purchase music and albums digitally. If users could just stream the songs they want through iTunes, they'd have no real incentive to purchase them.
Apple is OK with sacrificing a little bit of its music sales because they believe the iAds system will run on iRadio will make up for the loss.
AllThingsD reports the reason for Sony holding out on the project for so long had to do with the songs that users skip. Sony wanted to get paid for every single song it served up to users, even if they didn't end up listening to it. It isn't clear how that issue was resolved at this time, only that it has been since Apple and Sony have clearly reached some kind of deal.
The news comes just a few days before Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference. The conference would be the perfect time to unveil the iRadio service, however, the timing of the deal might be too soon for an announcement to be made for Monday's keynote. The conference is three days long, so perhaps an announcement could still be made sometime next week.
