aNewDomain — iHeartRadio is a digital radio service that streams music, for free, via live radio and personalized stations right to your phone or browser. The service has hundreds of live radio shows from across the U.S. on tap, and you can even create a station that has no commercials. Welcome to digital radio.
Loads of Content
The iHeartRadio service lets you stream over 1,500 live radio stations with as many genres as you can name — country, alternative, pop, R&B are all present, and even talk radio like news, sports and comedy are available. You can browse the stations either by location or genre, and, once a song is playing, you can give live feedback to the DJ via a thumbs up or thumbs down button.
The custom-made commercial-free stations are the best part of iHeartRadio. You just have to choose a song or artist — at the time of writing iHeartRadio has roughly 450,000 artists and 20 million songs on tap — to base the station on. Then you use the Discovery Tuner, which lets you chooses three options (among many) to add variety to your initial selection.
The iHeartRadio experience is driven by creating a long playlist of music that is tailored to your taste. To help with this, the company has created a number of features:
- For You provides station and genre recommendations based on your past musical preferences on iHeartRadio. If you log in via Facebook you can include those interests, assuming you have some musical ones listed.
- Custom Radio begins with popular artists and provides you an option to filter by genre.
- Live Radio lists radios by location with one drop down for country and city and another to select specific stations you might like.
- Shows gives you a drop down to select different types of shows that you can stream, and then provides a number of on-demand episodes that are available in that genre.
- Genres groups the available stations by genre for easy selection.
- Perfect For is an option for event oriented listening. Road trips, Monday evenings, Thanksgiving, having friends over or working out are some great examples. You can select a category and get a drop down list with twelve stations and playlists to choose from.
iHeartRadio is great for the casual and specific listener. You can head to the website and, in a few clicks, start listening, or you can create an account (or log in via Google Plus or Facebook) to create, save and listen to your stations from any device.
And when I say any device, I mean it. It’s free online, as a mobile app, in your car and even through a handful of connected devices at home or in the office. Here are the links: Android on Google Play, Apple iOS, Kindle Fire, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Xbox 360, Roku and Sonos. Then there are car companies, like Ford, Lexus, Subaru, and Toyota that can stream in select models. You don’t ever need to be without iHeartRadio again. Enjoy!
For aNewDomain, I’m Becket Morgan.
All screenshots: Becket Morgan
Featured image: Radio Free Strawberry by Alan Levine via Flickr
