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.

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.

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.

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.

Following the launch of Apple Music on Sonos earlier this week, the companies have launched an ad campaign to highlight the benefits of music in daily lives. Mikey Campbell, reporting for AppleInsider:

The marketing effort — dubbed “Music Makes it Home” — draws on statistics from a wide-ranging, multi-country Sonos study of 30,000 families that found positive correlations in listening to music and overall quality of life. As UK publication Marketing reports, the survey discovered music benefits sexual activity, relationship satisfaction, mood, happiness and other metrics.

To present the data in easily digestible TV spots and social media posts, the companies invited 30 families to take part in a social experiment that restricted each of the 109 participants from listening to music in the house for one week. After the prescribed deprivation period, music was reintroduced courtesy of Apple Music playing on a wireless Sonos system. Along with families in eight countries, celebrities St Vincent, Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike and The National’s Matt Berninger also took part in the study.

Interestingly, iPhones, Apple Watches, motion-activated cameras, and iBeacons were used to gather a variety of data during the experiment. Apple and Sonos have also launched a Tumblr blog with a collection of photos and descriptions of the families involved. A full breakdown of numbers and recorded stats is available here.

BuzzFeed’s Brendan Klinkenberg, reporting a statement from Apple on iTunes Radio ceasing to exist as standalone ad-supported service:

“We are making Beats 1 the premier free broadcast from Apple and phasing out the ad-supported stations at the end of January,” an Apple spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “Additionally, with an Apple Music membership, listeners can access dozens of radio stations curated by our team of music experts, covering a range of genres, commercial-free with unlimited skips. The free three-month trial of Apple Music includes radio.”

BuzzFeed argues that the exit from ad-supported stations is related to Apple phasing out its iAd network. From a customer’s perspective, iTunes Radio was limited to the US and Australia; folding stations – both those curated by Apple and created by users – into Apple Music will reach a wider audience and offer unlimited skips and no ads between songs.