It’s been tipped for months, and today a beta version of Clear Channel’s revamped iHeart Radio was publicly made available. For months, Clear Channel has been touting a new version with personalization as well as “more songs than Pandora” that would be commercial-free until the end of the year, in addition to its existing full suite of pre-programmed stations.

In June, when CBS Radio added its version of artist-based personalization to its existing Radio.com player, we took a First Listen. This morning, just after 8 a.m., we went back to do the same with the new iHeart Radio.

(Disclosure: my other employer, Edison Research, performs work for both Pandora, with which I have no involvement, and Clear Channel, although not with iHeartRadio.)

To get the beta player for the first week, one is instructed to log in through Facebook. Once in, you are given the choice of displaying your iHeart Radio profile to friends or only to yourself. Also listed among my friends enjoying iHeart Radio that morning, Clear Channel’s Tom Poleman, Michael Bryan, Doug Montgomery, and Chris Williams. (In fact, I saw a lot of the people I saw in the first days of Spotify.)

When I did my Pandora/Radio.com comparisons, I tried creating two new stations, one based on superstar Lady Gaga, and another for the more obscure ’60s garage punk/bubblegum group Music Explosion (“Little Bit O’Soul”). When I first logged into the iHeartRadio player, it was initially set to AC WLTW (Lite FM) New York. But rather than an existing station, I created similar stations to the ones from my CBS/Pandora test drive.

Like Pandora, but not Radio.com, iHeartRadio allows you to base a station on either an artist or song. Like Radio.com, it does not allow you to modify those stations based on additional variables. For the purposes of consistency, I used artists, not songs.

One smart feature I did encounter here was a slider bar that lets you choose “familiar artists,” “more discovery,” or a point in between. I’ve noted in the past that Pandora will generally respond to any cue involving a popular song or artist with a hit of equal magnitude—you’ll not only get songs you’d know, but songs that wouldn’t be out of place on a well-researched, big-market station. As you’ll see, I mostly ratcheted the discovery up, but found myself toggling it down in one instance.

station #1: lady gaga

iHeart’s personalized stations are commercial free through the end of the year. (When I did delve into the pre-programmed stations, I heard the same combination of Web-only songs and promos that I heard on the station’s regular stream.) As heard today, the custom stations are also unimaged. Here’s the Lady Gaga station, starting at the halfway point on the familiarity/discovery scale:

Lady Gaga, “Just Dance”
Britney Spears, “…Baby, One More Time”
Gwen Stefani, “Cool”
Amy Winehouse, “Rehab”
Nelly Furtado, “Promiscuous”
Pink, “U + Ur Hand”
Missy Elliott, “Work It” (first time I’d heard in a while, and sounded really good)
Kylie Minogue, “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head”

At this point, I moved the slider to the full discovery more:

Leona Lewis, “Better In Time”
Ke$ha, “Blow”
Pussycat Dolls, “Right Now” (the only non-radio-hit of the entire sequence)
Christina Aguilera, “Beautiful”
Beyoncé, “Crazy In Love” (I skipped this, see below)
Katy Perry w/Snoop Dogg, “California Gurls”
Beyoncé, “Halo” (probably because I hadn’t yet really listened to this artist)
Garbage, “Only Happy When It Rains” (an act that had a similar “downtown/cool” franchise to Gaga during their hit streak, but probably the only one here that you wouldn’t hear on FM radio with her)
Cascada, “Evacuate The Dancefloor”
Madonna, “Don’t Tell Me”

Musically, this was nicely cohesive for an artist station without being too claustrophobic—it wasn’t one obvious pick after another. That said, in more than an hour’s worth of music, there wasn’t one current, and only one true recurrent. There was also only one song (the Pussycat Dolls) that hadn’t been a radio hit. The variety was primarily in the songs that have been cleared out of most CHR libraries by time and research.

The player also displayed several dozen “similar” artists to Gaga: the first handful being Queen, Janet Jackson, Samantha Mumba, Beyoncé, Kelis, and Jordin Sparks.

Station #2 : MUSIC EXPLOSION

At this point, I switched to a new station—creating one around Music Explosion (“Little Bit O’Soul”), as I had for Pandora and Radio.com. After the second song, I moved from “familiar” to the halfway point on the familiar/discovery axis:

Music Explosion, “Little Bit O’Soul”
Turtles, “You Showed Me”
Grass Roots, “Baby Hold On” (great, lesser-known hit of theirs, and one that I’d previously only encountered on smaller Oldies AMs and specialty shows)
Dirty Pretty Things, “Bang Bang, You’re Dead” (2006 record from a band with a similar name to garage rockers Pretty Things—but in a similar spirit)
Blues Magoos, “Tobacco Road”
Steve Winwood, “Gimme Some Lovin’” (I actually missed this song, so not sure if this was Winwood or his Spencer Davis Group original)
Kingsmen, “I Will Rise Up From My Grave” (not the “Louie Louie” group, but a Southern Gospel group with the same name—might have still worked in a hipster irony way)
Youngbloods, “I Shall Be Released”
Troggs, “Love Is All Around”
Pretty Things, “Cries From The Music Circus”

At this point, I decided to see what would happen if I went more familiar:

Lovin’ Spoonful, “Do You Believe In Magic”
Sonics, “High Time”
Shadows Of Knight, “Gloria”
Ohio Express, “Firebird” (b-side of “Chewy Chewy,” but also beloved of the genre)
Cowsills, “Hair”
Standells, “Dirty Water”
Kingsmen, “Since You’ve Been Gone”
Box Tops, “Cry Like A Baby”
Tommy Roe, “Sweet Pea”
Electric Prunes, “Antique Doll”

The issue of similarly named artists was one that I’d also encountered in some of my subsequent Radio.com listening. With so many songs, it’s hard to put together perfect artist channels, and it’s also unlikely that the 10 people who actually would choose a Music Explosion channel would agree on how to program it. But I’ve come away from a lot of artist-driven stations with a feeling that the music was more coded than curated, something that’s hard to do with this many songs. (I had the same feeling, BTW, in the very early, pre-merger, days of Sirius Satellite Radio.)

That said, the Music Explosion station did pass one key test. Part of my motivation was seeing whether the other music defaulted to the garage side or the bubblegum/pop/Oldies side. (“Little Bit O’ Soul” is pretty much a turning point song that goes in both camps.) I group the Music Explosion with both the Standells and Tommy Roe and, to its credit, so did the station I created from a single variable.

Some other notes:

The current iHeartRadio player offers you a number of Web-only stations, some of which get a lot of prominence on that player. Here, Clear Channel’s national stations (their Premium Choice feeds), as well as artist-driven stations and the like are less front-and-center. The emphasis is on existing local brands or personalization, with the national stations further down on the “popularity” sort I did. Later, I went back to my homepage and the national stations were there, but “below the fold,” following my favorites and local stations.

As with regular iHeart Radio, the descriptions of most of the stations are a single slug line. As with most aggregators of terrestrial stations, there’s nothing to really help you sort out why you would want Chicago’s Kiss-FM or the one from Los Angeles.

One nice feature, however, is the “scan” button. After you’ve selected a station, you have the ability to punch quickly among eight or so others from the same genre.

The new player is clean and good looking. Like the last major revision of Radio.com, however, it looks like a Web-page, not a standalone streaming player.

UPDATE: On Monday, Sept. 12, Clear Channel also rolled out the updated iHeart RadioiPhoneapp. It was an immediate upgrade for me, simply because the previous app very rarely worked for me. It may have been as much a function of my many iPhone signal issues, but trying to listen to any station on iHeart Radio meant a minute of navigating the app for about four seconds of audio. I've now tried it in the car, at the gym, and in stationary settings and it's worked pretty consistently. Other people have mentioned problems with the app quitting on them—I've had that once. I had it a lot more often with the previous version.

Besides the one key "Mrs. Lincoln" difference, the new app is a lot easier to negotiate and more intuitive in most ways. That said, it seemingly does not allow you to designate streaming stations as favorites. There's also no alphabetical thumb index that allows you to choose a city from the many available markets anymore.

The biggest issue so far with iHeart Radio is particularly noticeable on the mobile app. Not everybody was willing to friend iHeart Radio on Facebook or grant access to their FB data to listen to streaming radio. On the mobile app, you cannot listen to the custom stations unless you're logged in. In addition, toggling between various functions meant that I was asked to log in for various reasons about a dozen times during my listening session.

If you’ve tried out the iHeartRadio player or mobile app, please leave a comment.

This article is part of the Thursday, Sept. 8 issue of Ross On Radio. Check out these other ROR articles:

First Listen, CKBE (The Beat) Montreal

Radio’s Best & Worst

Ross On Records: Can Adele and Gaga Break The Ballad Blockade?