Posts tagged with "Apple Music"

Apple Music Introduces Student Subscription With 50% Discount→

TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reports that Apple has today introduced a new student subscription plan for Apple Music which cuts the cost of the subscription to just $4.99 per month.

The option isn’t just arriving in the U.S., though. Students in other countries, including the U.K., Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, will also be able to take advantage of the new membership option.

However, because Apple Music is priced slightly differently in other markets, the cost of the student membership will vary. But in all markets, it will be 50 percent off the standard subscription price.

This is a smart move to boost subscription numbers. At just $5 per month, Apple Music becomes a really good deal - even for cash-strapped students. The new student subscription plan is available from today, but it does require you to verify that you are a student.

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Apple Announces New Apple Music API

Today Apple announced a new Apple Music API via its Affiliate Program Newsletter. According to Apple, the API:

…allows iOS apps to directly control Apple Music playback and more. We encourage affiliates to use the Apple Music API to provide a superior user experience by integrating music into their apps.

With the Apple Music API you can:

  • See if a user is currently an Apple Music member
  • See which country the user’s account is based in
  • Queue up the next song or songs based on a song ID for playback
  • Inspect playlists already in My Music or create a new playlist with a title and description (see App Store Review Guidelines for limitations).

The announcement coincides with the introduction of a new Apple Music Best Practices for Apple Developers page that serves as a hub for developer and affiliate program resources related to Apple Music. The page includes:

  • App Review guidelines applicable to the Apple Music API, some of which are new.
  • Links to developer documentation for the Apple Music APIs.
  • A summary of Apple Music identity guidelines regarding the use of the Apple Music name, logos, and related matters, with a link to the more comprehensive Apple Music Identity Guidelines.
  • Links to more information regarding the iTunes Affiliate Program.
  • A link to the Apple Music Toolbox page for searching Apple Music in each of the 113 Apple Music countries by artist, song, album, playlist, Connect, curator, radio and music video, from which you can generate affiliate links.

One thing I’d like to see added to these tools is the ability to return search results for items like playlists using the iTunes Search API, which would allow developers to generate affiliate links to them programatically. Right now those links can only be generated from the web-based search tool in the Apple Music Toolbox. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see Apple Music being opened up to developers, and not surprising given the emphasis on services during Tuesday’s investor call.

SongShift Eases the Transition From Spotify to Apple Music

When Apple Music debuted last summer I switched to it from Spotify. I wasn’t on Spotify all that long, but I did have a few playlists I wanted to take with me, including a big one with all the songs I had favorited. At the time, I found a script that logged into both services, tried to match the songs, and replicate the playlists on Apple Music. It worked reasonably well, but not great. SongShift automates that process. In my tests, SongShift did a solid job matching songs between Spotify and Apple Music, but because it is an import utility and not a sync service, it is a little cumbersome to use as a way to keep up with playlists you follow on Spotify that are frequently updated.

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New Promo Video for Apple Music Starring Taylor Swift→

Apple just posted a new video on the YouTube Beats 1 channel promoting its Apple Music streaming service. The video, called Taylor Mic Drop, features Taylor Swift who picks a ‘Getting Ready to Go Out’ playlist from Apple Music. When she sees The Middle by Jimmy Eat World, she plays it, dancing and lip syncing along to the music. The video is fun and does a nice job of highlighting what Apple Music calls Activity Playlists.

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Apple Posts Apple Music Ad Featuring Taylor Swift

Apple posted a new Apple Music ad on YouTube earlier today, featuring Taylor Swift listening and singing along to Drake and Future’s Jumpman while running on a treadmill.

The ad, which is called ‘Taylor vs. Treadmill’ and was posted on Apple’s Beats 1 Radio YouTube channel, features the ‘Distractingly Good’ and ‘All the music you want’ taglines at the end as Swift falls off the treadmill while still continuing to rap along.

Most notably, however, the ad focuses on Apple Music’s support for Activity Playlists, which include selections of songs for various scenarios such as working out or relaxing at home. In this ad, the playlist picked by Taylor Swift is called #GYMFLOW.

You can watch the ad below or check it out on Beats 1’s YouTube channel here.

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Shazam Gains Deeper Apple Music Integration with iOS 9.3→

One of the changes in iOS 9.3 – an API to add Apple Music tracks to playlists and the user’s library – especially made sense for apps like Shazam. And sure enough, Shazam for iOS has been updated with the ability to add tagged songs to any playlist and find all tagged songs in a ‘My Shazam Tracks’ playlist on Apple Music. There’s also support for playback of entire songs without leaving Shazam.

These features have been possible for Spotify users for a while now, and it’s nice to have them for Apple Music as well.

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Streaming Music Edged Out Digital Downloads in 2015→

Micah Singleton, writing for The Verge:

Streaming is now the biggest revenue stream for the music industry in the US, generating $2.4 billion in 2015. The RIAA has released its report on the state of the US music industry in 2015, and streaming music has edged out digital downloads in revenue for the first time. After declining last year, the music industry as a whole grew once again in 2015, selling $7 billion worth of music, a 0.9 percent increase from the year prior. Despite declines in digital downloads and physical sales, streaming music has managed to keep the industry on an upward trajectory.

“In 2015, digital music subscription services reached new all-time highs, generating more than $1 billion in revenues for the first time, and averaging nearly 11 million paid subscriptions for the year,” RIAA CEO Cary Sherman said in a memo sent out with the report. “Heading into 2016, the number of subscriptions swelled even higher — more than 13 million by the end of December — holding great promise for this year.”

The writing has been on the wall for a while, though streaming has edged out digital downloads only by a small portion (0.3%) in the US in 2015.

Count this as another instance of Apple cannibalizing one of its businesses to keep up with the times – we could argue that Apple Music was launched just in time amid a declining trend, without an ad-supported model that the RIAA clearly doesn’t like.

(I wonder if YouTube will accelerate the international expansion of YouTube Red anytime soon.)

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Apple Music to Offer Unlicensed Remixes and DJ Mixes→

Glenn Peoples, reporting for Billboard:

Dubset Media Holdings has announced a partnership that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previous been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues. Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service.

Dubset is a digital distributor that delivers content to digital music services. But unlike other digital distributors, Dubset will use a proprietary technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or long-form DJ mix file, identify recordings inside the file, and properly pay both record labels and music publishers.

Remixes and mashups are a huge part of what my girlfriend and I listen to on a daily basis (she’s a dancer, and she often needs remixes for her choreographies; she usually finds them on YouTube and SoundCloud). This is a nice differentiator for Apple Music, though the article suggests more streaming services will follow.

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Apple Music Connect, Seven Months Later→

Dave Wiskus has been trying Connect, the social feature of Apple Music, for seven months. He now reports back on how the experiment has been going:

Imagine a social network where you can’t see how many followers you have, can’t contact any of them directly, can’t tell how effective your posts are, can’t easily follow others, and can’t even change your avatar.

Welcome to Apple Music Connect.

I first wrote about my experiences with Connect last year:

Someone asked why I believed that Connect would ever be better than Ping, Apple’s previous attempt at socialifying iTunes. Ping’s mistake was that it tried to connect listeners to each other, as a way of discovering new music. Apple Music has re-thought that problem in some very interesting ways, and early indications are that the new approach works. For the social component, Connect wants to be about connecting artists with their listeners, but at the moment, it falls short.

These are early days, and there’s hope.

The morning after I posted this I awoke to an email from Trent Reznor. He had spoken to Eddy Cue and the team about my concerns, and wanted to assure me that they were being addressed.

Apple has had seven months to get their s*** together. Have they?

The whole post is damning. I hate to say this, but so far those people who originally made fun of Connect as another Ping have a point.

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