iHeart Radio has been one of the most successful iPhone apps to come out of the craze, because it fulfills a basic need: that of people for their music. Many of us grew up listening to a particular radio station, moved across the country, only to find that nobody played our music in our new place. iHeart Radio changed all that. Live since 2008, it has been an instant hit among critics and the general public alike.

iHeart Radio’s developers keep themselves in the background, rarely doing interviews or making public statements. They have done their best to turn iHeart Radio into an entity all its own, with a loyal fanbase and constantly updated content. Radio lovers are, of course, iHeart Radio’s primary fanbase. It’s like a radio dial with no static, where every station is a possibility. The app allows all the stations to be organized and searched through, so there’s no flipping the dial until you find something good. Just pick a station and go.

Critics have raved about how straightforward it is. Everything works, and nothing ever crashes. That you can just pick a station out of over 350 stations in the United States and listen to it is the theme of the app, no messing around with options or anything else. They love how it can put anyone in touch with the local culture anywhere, and this has been one of the general public’s greatest praises of the iHeart Radio iPhone app. In the United States of Modernity, it’s rare that we end up where we started out, so we get nostalgic for our music and our back-home culture. No wonder iHeart Radio has done so well in the app store: it fulfills a basic need, to connect and reconnect with the culture of our youth. In addition, it fulfills our need to surround ourselves with all the information we can, by connecting us with lyrics and cover art while listening to each song.

Finally, iHeart Radio maintains a vibrant Facebook presence, with a community of passionate radio fans and a number of special Facebook-only spiffs (such as the recent video of musician Justin Bieber’s private show) to keep public interest in the app. After all, if anything is anything these days, it’s got at least a couple thousand fans on Facebook, and iHeart Radio has over five thousand.