Posts tagged with "Apple Music"

Quartz Analyzes a Month of Beats 1 Tracks→

Fascinating findings by Quartz after collecting a month worth of songs played on Beats 1:

To get a sense of the station’s tastes and habits, we analyzed data on more than 12,000 songs played on Beats 1 from early July to early August. The song data was collected by Callum Jones, a programmer at Nitrous, who has open-sourced his tool over on GitHub. Jones also has a Twitter bot that automatically tweets whatever song is playing.

And:

Beats 1 has something that is rare in the world of digital music: scarcity. Listeners can’t choose a song and play it over and over. (They can do that elsewhere on Apple Music.) But curation doesn’t mean songs aren’t repeated. We counted 12,445 tracks but only 3,371 unique songs, meaning each track was played an average of 3.7 times. Eighteen of the 20 songs in the table above were played over 50 times.

“Edgy enough” seems like a fitting description. I’m an avid listener of recent releases, but I discovered a lot of new stuff with Beats 1 so far.

Permalink

11 Million Customers Sign up for Apple Music Trial, App Store Has a Record July→

Apple’s Eddy Cue and Jimmy Iovine spoke to USA Today reporter Marco della Cava about Apple Music’s early numbers:

One month after unveiling its new streaming music service, Apple has locked in 11 million trial members, company executives tell USA TODAY.

“We’re thrilled with the numbers so far,” says Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, adding that of that sum 2 million have opted for the more lucrative family plan at $14.99 a month for up to six people.

Whilst there are still 2 months of the Apple Music free trial period before user’s credit cards start being charged, there’s little doubt that those numbers represent a solid launch. For those curious about how those numbers compare to other services, Spotify announced in early June this year that they had “more than 20 million subscribers and more than 75 million active users”.

Cue also revealed to USA Today that July was a record breaking month for the App Store:

July also brought a fiscal high-water mark for the company’s App Store, which did a record $1.7 billion in transactions, “with particular momentum in China,” says Cue. That brings the total amount paid to app developers to $33 billion, up from $25 billion at the end of 2014.

Permalink

Listen to Full Beats 1 Shows Again with Beats 1 Replays

I’m not sure when Apple rolled out this change, exactly (though it appears to have gone live over the past three days), but you can now listen to several Beats 1 shows (including those by Zane, Julie, and Ebro) in full through Beats 1 Replays.

Previously, unless you listened to a show live or during its rerun twelve hours later, you were out of luck. Some of the shows on Beats 1 offered the ability to follow them on Connect and listen to the playlists of songs played during the show, but that didn’t include the complete show with DJ and guests.

Read more

Apple Music and DJ Apps→

Allen Pike, one of the developers behind WeddingDJ and the excellent Party Monster, has written on the new issues introduced with Apple Music for third-party media apps:

According to our latest stats, 17% of Party Monster users have been unable to play a song in their iTunes library, and 22% of WeddingDJ users have tried to cue a playlist that has so many unplayable tracks that we need to display a warning. While it’s a miracle that we’ve been able to maintain a 4 star rating through all of this, it’s not going to last if we stay the course.

Given all of this, we have a couple options. We could double down and go pro, catering to serious DJs who can load DRM-free music into our sandbox. Pro DJs who use our apps often have a large licensed library of songs, and won’t rely on iTunes Match or Apple Music.

Alternatively, we could steer towards the mass market, drop crossfading support, and regain full iTunes compatibility. We could also put in the work to add support for Spotify or other competing streaming services, and focus our apps less on playback features and more on having a great UI for queueing.

The standard iOS media player has never given a lot of freedom to third-party developers. I wonder if Apple Music with its “love” system could be even more of an excuse for Apple not to make the media player APIs more flexible. Not to mention, of course, DRM.

Permalink

Apple Music on Snapchat→

Adario Strange, reporting for Mashable on Apple’s usage of Snapchat for Apple Music:

In a fairly unprecedented move, Apple has taken its promotional message to a competing software concern: Snapchat.

The company’s brief Snapchat story takes us to Los Angeles, where Beats 1 DJ Zane Lowe (sporting an Apple Watch) goes behind the scenes of Beats 1 L.A. After a few scenes of Lowe DJing in the studio, he throws it to his colleague, DJ Julie Adenuga, to continue the music program in London.

I have Snapchat installed because of stories and how publishers are using it (see our previous articles on it), and this is pretty cool indeed. Apple Music has been very active on Twitter, and I hope this Snapchat experiment is successful because I love this kind of “behind the scenes” access.

Permalink

Beats 1 to Exclusively Announce MTV VMA Nominees Tomorrow→

Apple is continuing to put a big focus on Beats 1 as a platform to connect music fans and artists. Today, the company announced Beats 1 will exclusively announce the MTV VMA nominees tomorrow. Jordan Kahn writes at 9to5Mac:

The proof of that comes in the form of an announcement today that the station will exclusively reveal nominees for the upcoming Video Music Awards. Clearly Apple has partnered with MTV in order to be first to make the announcements, and it’s obvious from the effort that Apple hopes Beats 1 won’t just be the venue for new music, but also a source for music fans when it comes to news and other industry related events.

And on Twitter:

Just two weeks ago, we were talking about Apple Music as the new MTV. Pretty close as a start.

Permalink

Jonathan Poritsky: “Apple Music Connect Is Too Good to Waste on Artists”→

Jonathan Poritsky has a thought on Connect in Apple Music:

Artists postings thus far have been less than stellar. I think Apple has made a massive mistake billing Connect as a place to follow musicians. Connect is actually a wonderful service being squandered by Apple. The things that Apple is expecting artists to post just aren’t that interesting. Links to their own music and original photos or videos are relatively weak sauce, and the posts have been few and far between for most artists.

However, Connect is great for sharing exactly what I came to the Music app for: music. The trouble is most artists aren’t posting music; they’re promoting themselves in a fairly bland manner. I’ve found the best people to follow are DJs and performers with shows on Beats 1, as well as Apple’s in-house “curators.”

What he envisions is dangerously close to what Ping used to be, but the difference of following curators for updates on playlists could be key. I’ve also noticed that most artists on Connect tend to simply post links to their YouTube videos (often shortened to track clicks), so this is an interesting idea.

Permalink

Streaming Music and Offline Modes→

Writing for Wired, David Pierce argues that most music streaming services aren’t optimized for offline listening:

Streaming music has an offline problem. As they’ve fallen all over themselves reminding us how wonderful it is to have 30 million songs only a few taps away, all for the low, low price of $10 a month, these companies have forgotten that the key to a great music experience is pressing play and hearing music. That shouldn’t be as hard as they’re making it.

Sure, offline listening is an option in Rdio, Spotify, Google Play Music, and Apple Music, but it always feels like it’s hidden just enough to make you forget it exists.

As I noted last week on Connected, I don’t usually need to keep music saved offline because I’m either on WiFi or I have plenty of 4G data on my plan for streaming not to be an issue. But I occasionally prefer to save some music offline because of poor cellular coverage (such as at the beach where I go every summer), and browsing offline content feels like a bet against the streaming service.

Even in Apple Music – the successor to the iPod and Music app – browsing offline content in Airplane Mode mostly breaks everything else (static, last-seen previews aren’t cached in the For You and New tabs), and playlists saved for offline listening are still displayed alongside those that are not (even after toggling the offline switch).

Permalink

Apple Music as the New MTV→

An interesting thought by Zac Cichy on Apple Music:

Apple is positioning Apple Music to be the place to go for all things happening in the world of music. Think less MTV circa 1999 and more MTV circa 1992. Apple Music is meant to be the place both signed and unsigned artists alike strive to be. Beats 1 is the station they want to be played on. Which begs the question, is Apple Music as it stands enough?

A less discussed aspect of Apple Music is the ability to watch music videos with no ads. Maybe because they are not actually very prominent in the app. The important thing is that there is indeed a video component to the service.

Over the past week, I’ve noticed that I go to Apple Music whenever I want some music – whether it’s from search, a public playlist, a video, or a radio show.

I wasn’t sarcastic when I tweeted the variety of experiences revolving around music that Apple could consider. Vevo and YouTube are two obvious candidates: for many, listening to music has turned into listening to a free music video, and having video support from the first version signals that Apple is thinking about this space. There are some evident limitations, though: as it stands today, I can’t find many of the official videos I want on Apple Music, and, obviously, live shows and fan-recorded videos can only be found on YouTube.

There are many technical issues in Apple Music today, but I’ve also found a superior way of discovering music (which I’ll elaborate upon soon) and a key theme that permeates the entire service – everything about music.

While initial bugs can be fixed, core ideas are much harder to build at a later stage. The idea of a central destination for all things music resonates with me, and that’s why I’m paying close attention to Apple Music.

Permalink