In what appears to be a marketing effort for its subscription service, Apple has partnered with TuneIn to offer the free Apple Music radio stations outside of the Apple Music app for the first time.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, starting today, all six of the Apple live music radio stations will be made available to listen to on TuneIn. TuneIn reports more than 75 million monthly active users, spanning a variety of platforms and devices.
Live radio has been a key element of Apple Music since its inception, with Apple promoting the human curation element of its offerings as a competitive advantage to Spotify’s more algorithmic approach.
At launch in 2015, Apple Music premiered with the Beats 1 station, presented by Zane Lowe and others. In 2020, the station was rebranded as Apple Music 1. Lowe still has a popular slot on the station to this today.
Apple now offers a total of six live stations to listen to; Apple Music 1, Apple Music Hits, Apple Music Country, Apple Musica Uno, Apple Music Club, and Apple Music Club. The latter three are new additions which launched last year.
Until today, listeners needed to navigate to the Radio tab inside Apple Music to access these stations. The TuneIn partnership expands their reach. All six of these radio channels will now be streamed over the TuneIn platform, which encompasses smart speakers, mobile apps, the web and more.
While TuneIn customers can listen to them completely for free, without commercials, Apple Music will be promoted with a call-to-action link in the app and on the TuneIn’s website. Apple obviously hopes TuneIn listeners will enjoy the stations enough to want to convert into paying subscribers to access the complete Apple Music ecosystem.
Note this applies to the live streamed stations only. Apple Music’s algorithmically-driven stations remain subscriber exclusives.