Apple Music is launching a new weekly show with Zane Lowe called New Music Daily. The full press release can be found below.
Read More “New Music Daily with Zane Lowe Launches Today on Apple Music’s Beats 1”
Zane Lowe talked with Wired about the future of Apple Music:
There’s also the matter of how livestreams fit into the picture. After events with Shawn Mendes, French rap group PNL and Tyler the Creator, who did a live performance of his album IGOR, streamed on Apple Music the night before it came out, Lowe says “live music is definitely on the horizon” for the service. It’s all part of the team’s bid to “eventise” – his word – album launches. In the case of Tyler the Creator, “fans can tune in, then after watching it maybe you go to the album.”
When it comes to someone like Billie Eilish, who now has her own Beats 1 show, the Apple Music team realised that their pre-adds, which allow users to register their interest in an album before it’s out, had made people more invested in her March 2019 album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
Apple has launched a beta version of Apple Music for the web.
Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch:
Today, Apple announced that Shazam data will also now power a new Apple Music chart: the Shazam Discovery Top 50.
The chart will feature a weekly global ranking of the top 50 artists on the move and their trending track, based on Shazam data.
Some more information has been uncovered about the upcoming iTunes changes answering some of the questions people had.
The Music app is basically iTunes—but with a design update that puts Apple Music at the fore. You can still see your entire music library, of course, and even buy music on the iTunes Store if you want to. As someone who uses iTunes with Apple Music every day, I’m okay with this change. And if you click on the Songs view in the Library section of the sidebar, you will get your classic iTunes song list back, like it never left.
Apple told Ars Technica that on Windows, there will be no changes. Those who use iTunes on a PC to manage their devices, listen to music, and make iTunes purchases will be able to continue to do so.
What about the syncing features of iTunes? macOS Catalina builds them into the Finder. Attach an iOS device to a Mac and it appears in a Finder window’s sidebar. Select it and what looks like the standard iTunes sync settings screen appears in the window. You won’t get syncing or management of iOS apps, but you’ll be able to back up, update, and restore devices from the Mac.
Today was Apple’s WWDC keynote, and it was jam packed with stuff, but the most relevant to this website is probably the breakup of iTunes into new separate Podcasts, TV, and Music apps. The Verge has a good rundown:
The update will come with macOS 10.15. The shift makes sense, and has already taken place on iOS. Apple Podcasts, for example, has been on iPhones and iPads for years, but never made its way over to macOS devices. iTunes itself is a relic of a different era in which people bought all their music and movies in one place, and it’s felt neglected and outdated for quite some time.
It’s been a long time coming; I’m looking forward to the new Apple Music app.
Reuters is reporting that Apple Music has surpassed Spotify in paid monthly U.S. subscribers:
Apple Inc’s streaming music service overtook rival Spotify Technology SA in terms of paid subscribers in the United States, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
Apple’s service had 28 million subscribers as of the end of February compared with Spotify’s 26 million paid subscribers, the person said.
Zane Lowe sat down with Music Business Worldwide to talk about Apple Music and various other topics:
Well the artist, first and foremost, has to create an environment which offers a 360 degree creative experience for fans before we even think about how to collaborate with that [and] help them build their story.
An artist like Billie Eilish thinks in sounds, she thinks in colors, she thinks in visuals, she thinks in collaborations, she thinks in all kinds of different forms of creativity. When you’re dealing with an artist like that, it opens all these other areas that you can help build things around.
Spotify has filed an anti-trust complaint with EU regulators against Apple:
Spotify is filing a complaint against Apple with the European Commission, accusing the latter company of anticompetitive behaviour in the way it manages its App Store, and thus gives its own Apple Music streaming service an advantage over rivals.
I found this thread on Twitter did a pretty good job summing up my thoughts:
We’re not debating anything that that has anything to do with what’s good in the long run for customers.
We’re fighting over who gets to have a larger monopoly on fucking artists.
I think Apple has long had anti-competitive behavior in the app store, specifically in regard to rent seeking, and Spotify has its own issues that I think are anti-artist.
Apple Music is commissioning new custom playlist artwork:
The artwork is meant to “connect more directly with the communities and the culture for which they were intended,” says Rachel Newman, Apple’s global director of editorial. Before now, Apple’s playlists had a uniform presentation that didn’t necessarily speak to the music. “In many ways, it’s a visual representation of the music that you will find inside that playlist,” said Newman. That includes Hip Hop Hits, Dale Reggaetón, and The Riff, which are all immensely popular.
Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:
With the exception of For You (more on this below), all these sections can be turned off in the app’s settings and rearranged so that, for instance, your playlists and recently played albums are at the top of the screen, with Apple Music sections following down in the middle. Soor’s key proposition is this drastic departure from the organization of the Music app: rather than splitting the Library and For You into two separate tabs, Soor lets you mix and match both types of content in the same screen, enabling you to choose the order they’re displayed for faster access.
This looks like something I’ll need to check out this weekend.
“…We’re treating around 300 years of music from various countries, forms, philosophies, and so on as one genre. As far as modern commercial music, we don’t group the past 50 years together: can you imagine how strange it would be to group LL Cool J, Metallica, and The Spice Girls together? These are all artists that were popular in the 90s; beyond that, they have virtually nothing in common. Grouping together Mozart, Ravel, and Cage makes even less sense.”
A lot of really great points here.
Musish has put together a web player for Apple Music. It looks pretty good.
Federico Viticci, over at MacStories, has put together one of the most incredible Shortcuts I’ve ever seen:
When Spotify was my music streaming service of choice, one of the features I really liked was its personalized Wrapped report generated at the end of the year. I’ve always been a fan of geeky annual reports and stats about the usage of any given web service – be it Spotify, Pocket, or Toggl. I appreciate a detailed look at 12 months of collected data to gain some insight into my habits and patterns. […]
But Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding this feature to Apple Music, so I decided to build my own using Shortcuts. The result is the most complex shortcut I’ve ever created comprising over 540 actions. It’s not perfect due to the limitations of iOS and Shortcuts, but it’s the closest I was able to come to replicating Spotify’s excellent Wrapped feature.
As anyone that’s played around with the Shortcut app will tell you, this is extremely impressive. I highly recommend reading the entire post from Viticci to see how he built it and what the limitations are. I ran it to analyze my top 200 songs and was surprised to learn I listened to Tonight Alive a lot more than I remembered. You can find my full report here, if you’re curious.
Grab the Shortcut here.
Apple Music is now available on the Amazon Echo:
To set up Apple Music on the Echo, open the Alexa iOS app and go to the Music section of the app’s Settings. You won’t see Apple Music listed as an existing service, so tap the ‘Link New Service’ button, which will list Apple Music along with several other services.
Once you’ve logged in with your Apple Music credentials, the Apple Music Skill is enabled, which allows you to say things like ‘Alexa, play my New Music Mix on Apple Music.’ You can separately set Apple Music as your default music service, which lets you use Alexa to request music without specifying ‘on Apple Music.’
I’ve been playing with it all weekend and it works great. It doesn’t (currently) have access to your entire iCloud Music Library, so things in your personal collection aren’t available, but the millions of songs on Apple Music are all available, as are your custom playlists.