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by xcntktn 4421 days ago
There is a weird hivemind effect on display here and in other various Silicon Valley discussion circles where there is an unstated but very solid agreement that certain companies are "cool" and thus receive the most charitable interpretation of their plans and financial situations, but others which do essentially the same thing are run out of town on a rail, so to speak.

Take for example the story from today about Apple supposedly buying Beats. When the subject of Apple trying to compete in the music streaming space came up, everyone only talked about Spotify. Pandora, which has more than 3x the user base and is still growing? Not a mention. IHeartRadio, which was founded two years after Spotify and has more than double the number of paying subscribers that Spotify does? Never heard of them! It's as though Spotify is the only streaming music service that ever existed. In reality, they are near the lower end of the scale when it comes to customer traction, but they have mindshare on HN that is completely out of whack with that.
1 comments
silencio 4421 days ago
iHeartRadio is owned by Clear Channel and is advertised on their radio stations and billboards. My mother used to listen to a Clear Channel radio station and whenever I would listen with her, every other group of ads mentioned iHeartRadio back in like, 2010 and earlier. Before Spotify was available in the US, even. Now I see that said radio station has replaced all of their custom players to just redirect to iHeartRadio's streaming or music playlists.

That they have a lot of users by going that route is completely unsurprising. Not sure about paid, cause I'm pretty sure it's always been a free service so there is no paid subscription.

Clear Channel is also on such a different level from Spotify and Pandora right now that I'm quite sure that HN would start caring a lot more about iHeartRadio if it weren't owned by the 800 pound gorilla in the industry as opposed to the two startups. Only if iHeartRadio was owned by the record labels themselves could people care less, really.

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