Month: June 2015

Apple has announced a new product – Apple Music. It’s a streaming music service similar to Spotify or Pandora, but does have some unique features. Launching on June 30th 2015 in 100 countries, let’s see what Apple Music offers.

The basics

Apple Music lets you stream music from your PC, Mac or iPhone, with Android and Apple TV support arriving in fall 2015. When you sign up, you get a free three month trial, and after that it costs $9.99 a month. There is also a family plan, like Netflix offers. That will be $14.99 a month, and allow 6 people to connect to Apple Music.

Apple Music has a library of over 30 million songs, just like Spotify. It will also allow you cloud access to the music you’ve bought in iTunes as well as CDs you have ripped to your collection. You can also add Apple Music content to your iTunes library, and save music for offline listening.

Expert curation

So far, so standard, you might think. Apple is hoping that artists will make Apple Music a service you want. As well as streaming anything from its huge library, you’ll be able to check out curated playlists. Artists and music experts will create playlists, and they will be recommended to you depending on your preferences. The more you listen, the better Apple Music should get at recommending music and playlists to you. You can also browse playlists based on your activity, like running or driving.

24 hour radio

Then there is Apple Music Radio. A 24 hr service, its main station is called Beats 1 and will be broadcasting from LA, New York and London, ‘led by’ ex BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden and Julie Adenuga. There will also be Apple Music stations based on genre, from indie rock to funk, but we don’t know yet how many.
Apple Music Radio will also be available to anyone with an Apple ID – so you can listen without being signed up to the service. Apple Music members will have the advantage of being able to skip through songs they don’t want to hear, as much as they want.

Connect with your favorite artists

The last part of Apple Music is called Connect. This allows artists to share stuff, directly to their fans. It’s a bit like an integrated Twitter or Tumblr – you’ll see photos, videos and songs, status updates or whatever the artist feels like sharing from within Apple Music. Apple say it’s ‘unfiltered (and) unedited’, but knowing the company’s strong family values, we’re pretty sure there won’t be anything too raw allowed in Connect.

Connect’s success of course depends on artists getting involved – they will have profile pages, which include all the content they share via connect, as well as discographies and biographies.

What about Beats Music?

Apple Music is in part based on Beats Music, which Apple bought out in 2014. Existing Beats Music subscribers will be moved over to the new service, keeping their libraries, playlists and so on in tact.

We’ll publish a full review of Apple Music as soon as it’s available.

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Apple Music launches on June 30th 2015, a streaming music service entering an already crowded market. Can Apple make use of its huge iTunes user base and become a success?

We expect Apple Music to be a good listening experience, as Beats Music on which it is based already is. It’s pricing and features puts it on a par with existing streaming services, and Apple is clearly pushing expert and artist curation as its unique selling point.

Do you want to get closer to artists?

Many artists already connect with fans via social media: Facebook pages, Twitter and Tumblr. Will these artists be willing to do the same in Apple Music? This will hinge on whether Apple really does let artists connect in an unfiltered and unedited way, but this seems a little unlikely, as Apple always aims to be a family friendly place. Browse artist’s Tumblr accounts for a few minutes and you’ll quickly find things that are at the very least not safe for work!

Another reason to be a little skeptical is the description of Connect: artist profile pages, with feeds of content they have shared. The first thing that popped into my head was ‘MySpace‘, which tried the same artist curation trick when it was relaunched in 2013, a relaunch that was not a big success. In 2010 Apple launched Ping for iTunes, which was an attempt to combine social networking and recommendations, allowing you to follow artists. It was closed two years later, having failed to ignite users’ interest.

Friends or celebrities?

Spotify seems to have the social part right – having a community of your friends in the service works really well. You can see what friends listen to, share and collaborate on playlists. While Apple Music aims to get you closer to artists, Spotify is a personal and social experience.

I am sure Apple Music will be popular, if nothing else because 800 million people already have iTunes accounts, and signing up will be extremely convenient for all of them. But I can’t see it immediately stealing from Spotify, which many people already love, and have established connections and ties.

We like to think about winners and losers, but the reality is that there is space for more than one streaming music service, and Apple Music looks poised to be a major player. It can exist without beating Spotify, as Spotify can continue to exist even if Apple Music builds a bigger user base.

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