On page three of the IPO, Facebook mentions its radio interface with Pandora as a key way that the application creates value for developers:

Personalized and Social Experiences. We enable Platform developers to create better products that are personalized and social and that offer new ways for our users to engage with friends and share experiences across the web and on mobile devices. For example, a Facebook user can visit the Pandora website and immediately begin listening to a personalized radio station that is customized based on the bands the user Likes on Facebook.

On page 78 Facebook predicts that companies that traditionally advertise with radio will gravitate to the social networking app:

Television, print, and radio accounted for $363 billion, or 62% of the total advertising market in 2010 according to an industry source. Historically, advertisers interested in generating awareness of and demand for their brands have heavily relied on these offline media to reach their audiences at scale. We believe that these brand advertisers will increasingly dedicate a portion of their advertising dollars to Facebook because the broad audiences they are trying to reach are active on Facebook on a daily basis, because we can reach their desired audiences with precision, and because they can spark word of mouth marketing through Facebook. In December 2011, an advertiser could reach an estimated audience of more than 65 million U.S. users in a typical day on Facebook. By comparison, the 2011 season finale of American Idol was viewed by an estimated U.S. audience of 29 million people.

It’s evident that Facebook sees itself as a provider of every possible kind of media, and an attractor of every possible kind of media advertiser. Radio is part of the equation. With 845 million active users, how could it be otherwise?

I made some rough calculations based upon the typical bandwidth consumed by streaming internet stations that use MP3 to estimate that the 2 GB monthly cap would be good for 34 hours of stereo music, and the 200 GB limit would only let 200 minutes squeeze through. While 34 hours seems like quite a bit of listening on a mobile device, I could see how the hours could add up for someone using an iPhone to stream internet radio in a car during a long commute. Of course that wouldn’t account for any other data usage for activities like email, browsing and facebook.

Therefore I was surprised to read a recent interview with Pandora CFO Steve Cakebread in which he declared, “The impact of data caps for Pandora listeners is almost non-existent.” Speaking with the investment site Seeking Alpha, Cakebread explained the typical bitrate Pandora uses is 32 kilobits per second, which is one-quarter the 128kbps rate I used for my estimate.

Bitrate and fidelity are tied together, with higher bitrates typically meaning better quality sound. MP3 is a nearly 20 year-old codec, and 128kbps is generally considered the bare minimum bitrate for obtaining acceptable stereo sound for music. However, Cakebread explains that Pandora utilizes the much more modern AAC+ codec which is more efficient and delivers better fidelity at lower bitrates than MP3. He tells Seeking Alpha that the average Pandora user listens to 10 hours a month, which adds up to 140 MB. This means that even if an average user did all her listening on a mobile device using the cell network, she would come in way under her 2 GB cap.

It’s good to have this kind of data directly from a major internet broadcaster like Pandora because it does help us understand the actual constraints faced by mobile streaming. At 32 kpbs a mobile listener with a 2 GB data plan should be good for some 142 hours of Pandora a month, which would be like listening for 17 whole work days. I can definitely imagine there are folks who listen to that much terrestrial radio, and I don’t doubt there are some power subscribers who tune in to Pandora for that much. So it does also illustrate the gap between mobile internet radio and its wired broadband and terrestrial broadcast counterparts. While mobile listening may not be seriously curtailed by data caps, it is still limited in ways that wired broadband or wireless broadcast are not.

2010 saw car audio systems making the leap into internet radio with smartphone connectivity and integration with services like Pandora. Last year’s CES moved a few steps forward on that track, with more manufacturers and radio apps joining the fray.

This year’s big radio announcement came from Ford which added much broader device and apps upport to its Sync AppLink system. Now a Ford vehicle with Sync will work with Apple iOS, Android and Blackberry devices and apps like iHeartRadio, Slacker Radio, NPR News and Tune In Radio, allowing drivers to control the app through the car’s interface, patching the audio into the vehicle’s sound system.

GM also finally debuted its own smartphone sync systems called MyLink in Chevys and CUE in Cadillacs. AM/FM radio is still standard, but CD players are optional, causing some commentators to declare this is yet another indicator of the inevitable death of the compact disc (a topic I will take up at a later date). Subara announced that it would be offering Harman’s Aha Radio platform in some 2013 vehicles.

Slacker radio announced a new Verizon 4G optimized app for Android tablets as well as new content deals. Slacker, which provides free and subscription channels of music and news content via smartphone apps, internet radios and the web, will offer ESPN Audio, which includes live streaming ESPN Radio coverage of games. The company also announced a deal with American Public Media to provide free access to programs like Marketplace, as well as music from Minneapolis AAA station The Current. Finally, Slacker will be adding content from the Weather Channel, featuring local and national forecasts.

In terms of actual radios, the French electronics company Archos had the most exciting product on display with its “>Archos 35 Home Connect clock radio. The device runs the Android operating system and features a touch screen to navigate internet radio, weather reports and other apps. Blackberry announced that its 7.1 OS release will activate the FM radio chip inside its BlackBerry Curve 9360 and 9380 smartphones.

The bright side of CES 2012 is that radio was no more lackluster than any other sector. In fact, one might argue that the radio announcements were some of the highlights.

This is certainly an indicator of strong growth for internet radio and streaming services. Music royalties agency SoundExchange announced Tuesday that it ended the year collecting $292 million in royalty payments, up 17% from 2010. These royalties are paid by internet, satellite and cable TV music-only services for the right to play sound recordings, and are distributed to the owners of the sound recording rights. The payments are based upon listener hours, which means a service pays more royalties when more listeners are tuned in. Terrestrial radio is excepted from these royalties by statute, though all broadcasters are obligated to pay songwriting royalties via agencies like ASCAP and BMI.

SoundExchange also reports that 15,300 new artists, labels and rights holders were registered last year, and therefore became eligible to receive royalty payments.

I am definitely of two minds with regard to these payments, often known as “mechanical” royalties. On the one hand, I think it is only fair for musicians to be paid when services base their income on playing recorded music. But on the other hand, there are many non-commercial services that do not turn a profit, and for whom these payments can be burden. Furthermore, it is reasonable to question how much money individual artists see from these collections, since the major record companies arguably own the majority of mechanicals rights.

Even the for-profit services like SiriusXM satellite radio and Pandora have been protesting. They say that the SoundExchange fees are too high and that the terrestrial radio exemption is unfair. Last fall SiriusXM made waves by reaching out to the major labels to negotiate individual contracts that would bypass SoundExchange, in the hope of reducing its rates. Such a move is legal because SoundExchange is the default statutory collection agency for those who don’t have other agreements with rights holders. The catch with bypassing SoundExchange is that you end up with a lot of individual contracts to hammer out. The risk for artists with such arrangements is that those who own the rights to their recordings might have difficulty collecting their due royalties.

In any event, this rise in royalty payments are a strong sign that more listeners are turning to online radio and music streaming services, in addition to the more established satellite and cable providers.

(1) up to eight commercial radio stations in radio markets with 45 or more radio stations, no more than five of which can be in the same service (AM or FM),
(2) up to seven commercial radio stations in radio markets with 30-44 radio stations, no more than four of which can be in the same service (AM or FM),
(3) up to six commercial radio stations in radio markets with 15-29 radio stations, no more than four of which can be in the same service (AM or FM), and
(4) up to five commercial radio stations in radio markets with 14 or fewer radio stations, no more than three of which can be in the same service (AM or FM), provided that an entity may not own more than 50 percent of the stations in such a market, except that an entity may always own a single AM and single FM station combination.

In the FCC’s latest proceeding on whether to loosen these and other restrictions, broadcasters argued that satellite radio and Internet services like Pandora make these limits less necessary. The Commission disagrees:

“Satellite radio still only serves a small portion of all radio listeners and millions of listeners do not have broadband Internet access,” the FCC says. “Moreover, these audio programming alternatives are national platforms that are not likely to respond to conditions in local markets. Therefore, we propose that our local radio ownership rule continue to focus on promoting competition among broadcast radio stations in local radio listening markets.”

Speaking personally, I think that the FCC is right about this. Services like Pandora or Last.fm have yet to demonstrate any significant local presence anywhere, as opposed to the precious core of broadcast radio stations that really serve cities, towns, and rural areas with live news and information.

But the agency is proposing to eliminate its radio/television cross ownership limits, and everybody’s definitely starting to wonder how Internet only stations and music services compare with AM/FM broadcasters, audience metrics-wise. Folks are getting pretty touchy about the issue, too. Of late, Edison Research did an audience study for Pandora that included some Average Quarter Hour share data. Around the same time, Arbitron issued a statement questioning the wisdom of comparing Internet radio log file data with Arbitron audience estimates.

“There are many areas to be carefully considered when comparing Arbitron audience estimates with those from another source,” the Arbitron commentary noted. “We advise clients to avoid comparing self-reported audience estimates from Internet music services to Arbitron radio audience estimates,” given these differences:

• The difference between “one-to-many” broadcast stations and “one-to-one” Internet music services;
• The differences between Arbitron’s published methodology and calculations for its audience estimates and the estimates used by Internet music services;
• The ability of the provider to determine if a person is completing the survey task and should be counted as “exposed” to the content; and
• The reliability of self-reported demographic data and the steps taken to validate the information.

Meanwhile, Edison hit the ceiling over an Inside Radio piece on the issue that the research group called ”grossly inaccurate.” According to the excerpt published by Edison, the Inside Radio story claimed that the Edison study ranked Pandora figures with local radio stations via Arbitron stats.

“Edison has never (as in never ) reported anything other than the AQH figures for Pandora – full stop,” Edison’s statement insisted. “We defy Inside Radio or any interested party to come up with a ‘ranker’ from Edison that compares Pandora ‘alongside’ any terrestrial radio station.”

So is the consensus that broadcast radio and the Internet remain apples and oranges? Tim Westergren of Pandora would appear to disagree. This week he told the Wall Street Journal that Arbitron’s perspective reflected a “concerted effort” to keep his company out of the broadcast radio loop. “The broadcast industry does not want the world to know about us, basically,” Westergren declared.

Actually, big radio does want to know about Pandora, it seems, to the extent they can use the specter of Internet radio to convince the FCC that it should relax its local ownership rules. That tactic clearly isn’t working, so far. But if Internet radio actually develops a serious local presence, things might change.

Strap on some quality cans and check out the sound

I am bit of a stickler for audio quality and fidelity, as readers of my holiday gift guide and recent review of iHeartRadio may have sussed out. I’m reticent to call myself an audiophile because I’m not in pursuit of perfect audio nirvana, nor am I willing to spend the price of a new family sedan on speakers and amplifiers. But I do prefer to listen to well reproduced music. I am willing to spend some money and time to obtain higher fidelity, but I also don’t think it must require significant investments of either.

As I noted in my aforementioned iHeartRadio post, compressed online digital audio can exhibit many sonic defects resulting from that compression and other processing. Of course, one can complain about the sound quality of a free streaming radio service, but if it’s that grating I just don’t listen.

If I’m going to subscribe to an online radio service, like Pandora or Spotify, then I expect to enjoy decent fidelity, even if true CD quality is unlikely. Writer John Grandberg recently wrote a review of the sound quality of streaming radio services for Inner Fidelity. That site is affiliated with the venerable hi-fi magazine Stereophile and focuses on personal audio listening with headphones.

In order to winnow down the field Grandberg excluded services that offer streams at bitrates of 128kpbs or lower. While 128kbps has long been considered the lowest acceptable bitrate for so-called “near-CD quality,” at this point in time most serious listeners contend that higher bitrates are better. He also only reviewed the subscription versions of services, which typically offer better sound quality than their free versions.

He ended up putting five services to the test: Pandora, Aupeo!, Spotify, Rdio and Mog. Of these three are on demand services (Spotify, Rdio and Mog) and two are more radio-like, without the ability to select specific artists and tracks (Pandora and Aupeo!). I have to admit that I’d never heard of Aupeo! before reading this review, though apparently the Germany-based service has been around since 2008.

I won’t give away the results here, but I found them interesting, as it seems like several very popular platform offer widely varying sound quality, probably due to their catalogs having been encoded at different bitrates over time. This is good information for the potential subscriber to have, and I’m honestly surprised that more reviews don’t take a critical ear to sound quality.

New Spotify Radio lets you skip unlimited tracks

Now Spotify has announced a new version of its radio feature that is available with the preview version of the Mac, Windows and Blackberry apps. The company says it has a an “all-new intelligent recommendation and multi-million track library.” But the thing that sets it apart from the likes of Pandora and last.fm is the ability to skip an unlimited number of tracks. By comparison the other services only allow a limited number of skipped tracks.

This difference stems from the different types of licenses the services operate under. Pandora and last.fm operate under the same license terms as internet radio station, which restrict the ability of listeners to select specific artists and songs, in addition to restricting the number of tracks by an artist or from a single artist that may be played in a row. Spotify, on the other hand, has worked out individual agreements with all the labels that provide music to the service that allow the service to permit listeners to select the artists, albums and songs they want to listen to. However, these agreements cost Spotify much more in licensing costs than what Pandora or last.fm pay.

While this would seem to give the competitive advantage to Spotify, it results in gaps in the service’s catalog where labels or artists will not license their music at all. Pandora, on the other hand, takes advantage of a statutory license which does not require individual deals with labels. For the Pandora listener this means she can hear bands like the Beatles and Metallica which are absent from the Spotify roster.

Another difference is that Pandora and last.fm have many more station building options, allowing you to specify additional artists and songs to add to an existing station, or use your own music library as a seed. As far as I can tell Spotify offers none of these options. You can simply select an artist to use as a radio seed source and that’s it.

In my limited listening to the new Spotify Radio I find that the range of artists is still not as broad or varied as Pandora. Spotify seems to stick pretty closely to genre and style. While there are times that I may want to listen to some music closely related to an artist, it’s doubtful I’m going to listen for more than an hour or so without getting bored. Pandora does a better job of holding my attention with variation and tunes I’m less familiar with.

Kindle Fire playing TuneIn radio

2011 was supposed to be the Pandora Takeoff Moment—the year that Pandora went public and solidified its absolute, total dominance over Internet radio and music streaming. And coming out of the starting gate in February, it sure looked like that was going to happen. Pandora’s S-1 form noted that it had registered 80 million users as of January 2011, with a new one signing up every second.

Plus, Pandora had cornered around half of all Internet radio listening among the top 20 online stations and networks in the United States, according to one survey. “Since we launched the Pandora service in 2005, our listeners have created over 1.4 billion stations,” the S-1 statement added.

But by the third quarter of this year, it was clear that while Pandora remains King of cyber-radio—like Louis the XVI, its reign has yet to reach financial sustainability. Royalty costs, the fragmented mobile listening market, and, gasp, competition from broadcast radio for advertisers has forced the company to spend more cash on product development, marketing and sales. Some of that competition is coming from Clear Channel, with its upgraded version of iHeartRadio.

“We expect that this increased level of operating expenses will continue into the future,” Pandora’s S-3 statement disclosed. ”As a result of the foregoing factors, we expect to continue to incur operating losses on an annual basis through at least the end of fiscal 2012.”

Meanwhile, something else was happening too: a plethora of music social networking startups, exports, experiments, and rebels popped up all over cyberspace, or reinvented themselves. These outliers are redefining not only online music sharing, but “radio” itself. Here is an admittedly ramshackle assessment of some of the most interesting players.

Turntable.fm

Turntable.fm surfaced in May of this year, and it quickly took Internet radio by storm. You can access the site via your Facebook or Twitter account. “TT.fm”—as its fans call it, allows users to create rooms and share tunes via the service’s database. Or subscribers can upload music themselves. Once established, you get points from other listeners who “awesome” your picks. They can also list themselves as one of your fans.

Over the last six months, a veritable universe of Turntable.fm stars have emerged, the most noted of them being DJ Wooooo, the “#1 Deejay on Turntable.fm,” as his Twitter page explains. He has no less than 7,065 fans, according to the ttdashboard. But he also has plenty of competition. An uncountable number of full and semi-entrepreneurs are now running all kinds of music events on these rooms, from “Mashtivals” to “Party Bus” frolicks.

From May through September, tt.fm enjoyed a huge wave of adulation and buzz. Then its participation numbers dropped, to the apparent delight of skeptics. But I continue to see turntable.fm as a real breakthough, a way for small groups of people to create online community radio stations that replicate the radio dj experience. The tt.fm story is just beginning, I suspect.

Soundtap and and RadioFlag

Less well known but very much deserving of mention are Soundtap and RadioFlag. As Jennifer Waits points out, RadioFlag’s search mechanisms have become a bit hit with the college radio loving crowd. And that goes quadruple for Soundtap, the “human-powered” and “crowd sourced guide to independent radio” that allows you to aggregate your favorite community and college radio shows.

“While investigating the site today, I spotted shows from some of my favorite DJs at KALX , KZSU, KUSF in Exile, and WFMU,” Jennifer noted in her review of Soundtap. “I was also able to add some programs from my own station, KFJC . The interface allows you to add not only descriptions of radio shows, but also links to their Facebook pages, Twitter URLs, and playlists.”

Spotify

Some experts think that Spotify’s migration from the United Kingdom to the United States may have taken some of the steam out of tt.fm. As Radio Survivor’s Paul Riismandel notes, Spotify’s “killer feature” is that it allows you to share a full playlist with other users:

because it most closely emulates the experience of a mix tape, as easy to assemble as making an iTunes playlist. Certainly there are other ways to share a playlist of tunes online, but most require you to either just share the list of songs which the other person would have to assemble herself. Otherwise you have to upload the song files yourself, which is something that exists in a legal grey area, at least in the US.

On the other hand, Paul didn’t think that Spotify scratched “the radio itch.”

A jukebox is not the same thing as a radio station. For me the radio music experience is marked by a combination of predictability and surprise. I know the genre of the stations or the specific show, but I don’t know what song will come next; often it will be something I’ve never heard before. Both Pandora and last.fm provide something much closer to that radio experience, combined with a level of control that lets you filter out sounds you don’t want to hear.

A host of Spotify-like services have also appeared on the horizon, most notably Rdio and Myxer Social Radio, the latter which our reviewer Eddy Vien describes as “a hybrid between Pandora and Turntable.fm.” But I tend to agree with Paul’s radio-versus-jukebox observation. Spotify is a breakthough in sharing, but not necessarily one of the radio kind.

2012 and beyond

Kindle Fire with Pandora and speaker

With various online radio friendly tablets hitting the market, all sorts of turntabling and sharing applications are coming out now. We’re still looking for reviewers for loDj.org, which allows you to “watch local music,” Songza (“expert made playlists for everything”), and Black Planet Radio, which is part of “Black Planet” (“Join the largest Black Community online!”).

There are probably a dozen other apps that have escaped our attention, but what didn’t miss our gaze is the advertising deal that Clear Channel has made with Cumulus. The latter’s 570 stations will be featured on iHeartRadio, and the former will have access to Cumulus’ Sweetjack.com: “the rapidly growing deals platform that provides local merchants—including the best restaurants, spas, salons, stores and venues—the promotional power of radio.”

Everybody is getting into the social networking biz now. The process is slowly but surely creating an authentic online radio experience and redefining conventional radio as well (especially with widely used song searchable apps like TuneIn radio). It would help if the economy picked up, but it says worlds about the level of creativity out there that so much innovation is happening right now in such dire times.

More than 1,300 digital HD2, HD3, and HD4 channels across the country are broadcasting programming, which can be heard with an HD Radio receiver.

HD Radio Technology also transmits show Program Service Data – such as song titles and artist information – that display on the CUE audio screen. It can be paused up to 20 minutes, allowing users to resume the program – similar to a DVD – if they interrupt a program while driving.

In the Cadillac CUE system, HD Radio users will have the added feature of iTunes® Tagging, which allows listeners to tag their favorite songs for later preview and purchase on iTunes.

“HD Radio Technology is an excellent addition to CUE, the groundbreaking user experience for connectivity and control which will debut in the new XTS luxury sedan in spring 2012,” said Cadillac Product Director Hampden Tener.

But that’s not the whole story.  Much as it has been in the past, HD Radio will continue to receive stiff competition from the usual suspects: Sirius/XM Satellite Radio, iPod connectivity, and, most interestingly, access to a Pandora application directly from CUE.

Personally, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with HD Radio. Since it’s inception, HD Radio had a tough time correctly branding and positioning the service, which, remember, doesn’t stand for High Definition (it doesn’t stand for anything, and is technically the proper name of the product created by iBiquity).  I love the idea of HD Radio: it widens the terrestrial radio band and gives the listener more choices with minimal effort.  All that’s necessary is an HD Radio receiver.  But within the last few years, instead of creating new, unique content on the HD1, 2 or 3 stations, radio owners are dumping formats from the traditional FM band and placing them on HD Radio.  For instance, while it saves face for CBS to tell fans of West Palm Beach’s rock station WPBZ that their station still exists, even though it was displaced from FM earlier today by an Adult Top 40 format, it’s just on an HD Radio station (and also streaming online).  In other words, there are few unique HD Radio stations that make HD Radio a compelling option, especially when presented on the same platform as Sirius/XM and Pandora, as we’re seeing in the aforementioned CUE system (sidenote: I find the most intriguing HD Radio offerings to be those that combine two of the best features of terrestrial and satellite radio: localized and niche programming.  For example, WXDX’s HD2 stream is devoted entirely to the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins.  At Detroit’s WRIF’s, their HD2 stream goes under the moniker of RIFF2, and is comprised entirely of music – new and old – from the Motor City.)

HD Radio’s major problem is that consumers still have a hard time pinning down exactly what HD Radio is.  While including the offering in more cars, where the majority of the time spent listening to terrestrial radio takes place is a start to increase awareness, I have a hard time believing your average new car buyer will take the time to embrace or even casually explore HD Radio.  Pandora announced earlier this year they’ve reached 100 million users, with 36 million of those users accessing the site monthly, and with more internet radio applications likely to be included in automobiles within the next few years, HD Radio has a tough hill to climb.

Clear Channel may have been too focused on scarfing up stations in the early 2000s to construct anything resembling an internet strategy, but the company has been making up for lost time with its iHeartRadio service. When it went live in 2008 it was primarily a site and mobile app to provide access to the live streams of Clear Channel stations. Since then iHeartRadio has morphed into a competitor to the likes of Pandora and last.fm, especially with the addition of custom stations in September which provide Pandora-like experience of music based upon a seed song.

Back in September Clear Channel promised that the stations would be commercial free through the end of the year. This week the company announced that they will stay commercial-free through April 1, 2012.

This is obviously a move intended to lure Pandora and last.fm listeners who want to avoid the free services’ commercials, in addition to hooking users already using iHeartRadio to catch terrestrial stations. However, when a Pandora user jumps ship she also loses the stations she has created and all the curating she’s invested by giving tracks the thumbs-up or thumbs-down. That user investment is one of the things that keeps Pandora users loyal, though a new user to iHeartRadio can make the same investment in Clear Channel’s platform.

Working in Clear Channel’s favor is that if a listener tires of her custom stations she can easily navigate to a broadcast station–that will have plenty of commercials–or one of iHeartRadio’s curated or themed stations, like CBGB Radio or Eagles Radio.

I must admit to being a strong critic of Clear Channel and the destruction it wreaked on the radio industry through its consolidation strategy that hemorrhaged staff and homogenized programming across the country. So there definitely is a part of me that wants to find fault with iHeartRadio, on principle, if nothing else.

But after spending the better part of the week listening to the service I must be honest and give it due credit. It’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades for internet radio listening. It offers a lot of options, even if none of them are class leading. But, as I’ll explain, the sound quality of iHeartRadio is probably its weakest attribute.

The customized stations work like last.fm or Pandora. Feed it a song seed and iHeartRadio starts serving up similar artists and songs. One aspect I like is the “Station Control” feature which lets you decide whether you’re interested in hearing more familiar artists or “more discovery” which plays artists you are less likely to have heard before. When I first tried the custom station feature I wondered if I would be limited to artists actually played on Clear Channel stations. So I entered the 1980 Swiss experimental metal band Celtic Frost as a test. And quite dutifully iHeartRadio created a station full of extreme and harsh sounds that are rarely found on commercial radio.

However, the custom stations are more limited than Pandora’s because you can specify only the initial seed. By comparison Pandora lets you finely tune a station by adding additional artists and songs as seeds. So if you like the 70s power pop of Cheap Trick, you can further refine it by adding in the more ragged punk edge of the Replacements, for instance.

iHeartRadio’s curated channels remind me most of satellite radio, organized around a genre, such as hair metal, the music of a particular artist, or songs ostensibly chosen by an artist, like Radio Weezer. Of course the terrestrial stations on iHeartRadio are just that. I’m not sure how much the rock station in Waco, TX will differ from WZZO in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. But if it matters to you, then you have the choice.

Fidelity is what I find to be iHeartRadio’s greatest limitation. I’ve listened to the service on my iPhone, iPad and two different Mac laptops. At home I’ve used both my MacBook Pro’s built-in headphone jack and two different USB audio devices. Across all devices I found that the custom stations sound the best. While quality does vary some from song to song, overall fidelity is roughly equivalent to Pandora’s free service. In general that’s equivalent to a 128 kbps MP3 file, which is considered the minimum for decent sound.

By comparison, the custom stations all exhibited perceptibly lower quality sound that would indicate a lower bitrate is used. No matter the station I chose the high end exhibited the shimmery quality of a poorly encoded MP3. There’s an overall graininess to the sound that I find fatiguing when listening on headphones for more than 10 or 20 minutes. These deficiencies are quite audible over speakers, too, though less bothersome at low volumes.

The broadcast stations are all over the map, in terms of fidelity. While some approach the smoother quality of the custom stations, most had a compromised and grainy sound like the curated stations. However, I found most of the broadcast rock stations to be even more fatiguing than the curated stations due to the heavy compression and processing evident in these streams. Most mainstream commercial stations use compression and other sound processing to make their stations sound louder and stand out when a listener is scanning the dial. This comes at the expense of dynamics, as the volume of the sound varies very little, with much less change than you’d hear when listening to the original recording.

Listening to most broadcast stations on iHeartRadio with headphones was tiring after 10 minutes or less. In all cases my local analog and HDRadio broadcast signals sounded much better than their internet stream counterparts. In particular the treble was overly pronounced and distorted on the internet streams, while the broadcast signals sounded smoother and more natural to my ear.

I recognize that I’m probably more sensitive to sound quality than many listeners, however I’d frankly rather listen to a decent AM signal than have to hear many iHeartRadio stations over headphones for more than a half-hour. Using cheap computer speakers at low volume the fidelity limitations are less perceptible, and I’m certain that’s how many folks experience internet radio. But I think the sonic flaws of even the curated and genre stations are obvious enough for an average listener to recognize, especially if she compares it to the custom stations or a broadcast signal.

That said, I can see the appeal of having all of these options in one app. I’m not sure it’s enough to keep me from using Pandora, Spotify and other services. The field is getting pretty crowded, and while each service offers something unique, none of them is sufficient to take over the majority of my online listening time. I may be a freak that way, with tastes that run decidedly outside the mainstream. Then again, isn’t the promise of the internet supposed to be infinite choice?

I’m curious to know what Radio Survivor readers think about iHeartRadio and other internet radio services. Let us know in the comments.