Behold, An iPhone App That Brings You Something Resembling “Pop Radio,” With No Annoying DJs

noah | November 25, 2008 1:00 am

Over the weekend, I ponied up $2.99 for an iPhone app called “Top 100 On iTunes,” which is powered by the “iTunes-freeing” company nutSie and which pretty much offers what the title says: A shuffling stream of what it claims are the iTunes Store’s top 100 tracks, a.k.a. the closest thing you’ll get to any sort of genre-spanning consensus regarding “popular music” these days. Pro: The streaming quality out in the wild (well, the wild streets of Manhattan, anyway) was really good, even for us old-school iPhone users who aren’t privy to AT&T’s 3G Network; there are also genre-specific versions of the app, in case you want to figure out just what the 99th-most-popular rock song right now might be. Con: Thanks to royalty issues, the playlist can only be shuffled, and not played in any sort of order specified by the user (although there is a “skip” button, thankfully). Odd: Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” was on the list, despite its notorious unavailability on the service. Does this mean that “iTunes” has turned into a branded-generic a la “Xerox” and “Baggie”? [nutSie]

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