Windows Phone

Clear Channel has launched its iHeartRadio app for Windows Phone 8 app. For two weeks beginning today, iHeartRadio will be featured in Microsoft's "Summer of Appiness" campaign, which encourages customers to visit their local Microsoft retail store to experience the latest version of the app.

More than 1,500 live radio station streams are available on iHeartRadio (in addition to Clear Channel-owned broadcasters, the app also includes streams from Univision, Cumulus, Greater Media stations, WNYC, EMF's Contemporary Christian Air1 and K-Love stations, college radio, Cox, Emmis, Salem and others). It also offers user-created "Custom Stations" and Songza-like "Perfect For" mood-related stations. Clear Channel has recently added what it calls the "Discovery Tuner" to iHeartRadio. With it, the listener can adjust a Custom Station to play more familiar songs, or select "Less Familiar" to play a wider variety (we've seen this type of "slider" control with SiriusXM's MySXM and Slacker).

The new Windows Phone 8 app will enable users to pin stations directly to the phone's Start screen as Live Tiles for quick launch, and will allow users to view what's playing without opening the app.

When Pandora launched its comprehensive mobile app redesign (see RAIN here), it announced Windows Phone listeners would get a free year of ad-free listening.

Today the leading webcaster announced the app is now available for Windows Phone. And users indeed will hear no ads (most Pandora listeners use the service via free, ad-supported streaming), "courtesty of Microsoft," through the 2013 calendar year.

Exclusive to the Windows Phone app are two new features: Live Tiles lets listeners "pin" their customized stations to their phone's Start screen for easy access without having to launch the app. Kid's Corner which automatically activates an "explicit content" filter for "kid-friendly" listening.

Microsoft has set October 26th as the day it will roll out the new Xbox Music service (announced in RAIN here) to Windows Phone, Windows 8, and the Xbox 360 (Windows 8 OS is scheduled to launch that day as well).

Microsoft reportedly plans to offer Xbox Music across other platforms, like iOS (Apple) and Android.

As we've reported, the service will include both ad-supported streams and a subscription access. Integration with Microsoft's SkyDrive will enable customers to keep music and playlists in the cloud.

Read more from The Verge here.

Nokia has since last October planned to offer its Lumia Windows Phone users a free music streaming service with Pandora-like radio features (RAIN coverage here). That service has been available to European users for months, but today Nokia brings the service to the U.S.

Nokia Music is free and replicates a radio experience in at least two ways. First, it includes a line-up of more than 150 curated playlists created by a "US-based team of 'musicologists.'"

Second, users can create their own custom playlists "with a Pandora-like feature that pulls in songs based on a selected artist and plays them back in random order, without advertisements," reports Engadget (here).

ESPN Radio has launched a new app exclusively for Nokia's Lumia Windows Phone 7 devices. The app is part of Nokia's "continuing effort to keep its devices differentiated from the rest of the Windows Phone pack," reports The Verge.

The app includes more than 35 ESPN Radio podcasts, live streams and customized offerings. The Verge has more coverage here.

Berlin-based Internet radio service Aupeo! has launched an app for Windows Phone devices. The app offers access to the service's hundreds of genre-, mood- and artist-based customizable radio streams.

"It's a well designed app, and one we believe is well worth checking out," writes WPCentral (here).

You can find more from Aupeo here.

If you're interested in finding out more about Aupeo, the company's CEO Holger Weiss will be a panelist at our upcoming RAIN Summit Europe. Click here to find out more.