Billboard reports that Apple Music has hit 20 million subscribers.
Apple has released the latest numbers for the music subscription service Apple Music. In the 18 months since the service was launched, the tech giant reveals that it has just crossed the 20 million paid subscribers mark. It last reported 17 million subscribers in September, marking a 15 percent jump in three months.
Dan Rys, at Billboard, sat down with Jimmy Iovine to talk about Apple Music:
Before we get into that, we have to get into the why. It’s a story, it’s complex. Because what everyone’s writing is the obvious right now. They’re writing, “People in the record business are getting into tech so they can talk to people in the record business.” That’s hogwash. And why it’s hogwash is, it takes a certain individual… For example, I met [Apple executives] Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue in 2003. I realized, okay, the future of music is going to be intertwined with distribution through technology companies. It just looked like that to me, and I realized how far behind I personally was. So I set out to really understand. So I worked with those guys for about two years, and I said to Steve, “I’d like to do headphones with Apple with [Dr.] Dre,” about two or three years later. He said, “Do it yourself, you can do it.” So I tried it myself.
Craig Mclean, with a profile of Zane Lowe for the Evening Standard:
“Deciding within a few hours to jump on a plane for Tokyo to interview Frank Ocean, and getting the go-ahead from him by text — ‘Yeah, do it, get on a plane’ — and that’s all we have: we don’t have a time, we don’t have a location and there’s a freedom in that which makes it incredibly exciting to be working in this modern framework.”
“This modern framework” is the music industry’s new frontier. It’s a still-virgin landscape where Apple runs the show and its expat Londoner sheriff always gets his man.
James Corden stars in the latest Apple Music ad.
Apple Music has added two new weekly playlists to the “For You” section of the service. The first comes out on Wednesday and is a “My Favorites Mix” that is based on songs you love. The second is a “My New Music Mix” that comes out on Friday and contains new music from artists that Apple thinks you’ll like. It looks like, currently, this is only available on the iOS 10 beta version of the service, but I hope they end up bringing it to the desktop as well.
Apple has announced their Apple Music Festival lineup: Alicia Keys, Bastille, Britney Spears, Calvin Harris, Chance the Rapper, Elton John, Michael Bublé, OneRepublic, Robbie Williams, and The 1975.
The full lineup was announced today by Julie Adenuga, the London voice of Beats 1, an Apple Music radio station that celebrates the best new music every day. Apple Music lets fans get even closer to their favorite performers during the Apple Music Festival with exclusive playlists, artist news and backstage interviews throughout September. The 10 spectacular nights of live performances will be made available live and on-demand to Apple Music members in 100 countries on their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, PC, Apple TV and Android phones.
Apple Music Festival 10 returns to London in September for 10 exhilarating nights of live music. Residents of the UK can win tickets to the gigs. Apple Music members around the world can watch the performances for free. Ticket applications will be opening soon. Follow @AppleMusic on Twitter and Snapchat for up-to-the-minute information and join the #AMF10 conversation.
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Apple has bought the rights to “Carpool Karaoke” and will be releasing episodes exclusively on Apple Music:
The viral segment that broke out on the Late Late Show With James Corden is being turned into its own series, which will air first exclusively for subscribers to Apple’s music streaming app.
Carpool Karaoke, which will be produced by CBS Television Studios and Fulwell 73, the production company of Late Late Show executive producer Ben Winston, will expand on the segment’s format with celebrity guests who sing along to their favorite songs and surprise fans during their ride. The host of the series is expected to be announced at a later date; Corden is not expected to take the wheel.
Jim Dalrymple, writing for The Loop, on how Apple Music has started to use fingerprint-based song matching to fix the (annoyingly bad) metadata-based system it was using before:
Apple has been quietly rolling out iTunes Match audio fingerprint to all Apple Music subscribers. Previously Apple was using a less accurate metadata version of iTunes Match on Apple Music, which wouldn’t always match the correct version of a particular song. We’ve all seen the stories of a live version of a song being replaced by a studio version, etc.
I can’t believe this isn’t what the service launched with. The key feature for me has been the combination of my library with a streaming library and every time this fucked up I wanted to randomly delete a line of code from whomever wrote the system so they could feel my pain.
Robert Levine, writing for Billboard, about Apple’s new proposed royalty structure for streaming music services:
Apple’s suggested royalty structure would make accounting simpler and more transparent, but it would also make it more costly to run a free service, since streaming companies would have to pay a minimum rate, rather than a percentage of revenue. The current system arguably benefits Spotify and YouTube, since their free tiers don’t generate much revenue compared to paid services.
Seems win/win for Apple here: They score points with artists, and they make Spotify look bad.
After boosting Jimmy Eat World up the charts with her lip syncing of “The Middle,” Taylor Swift is back with a new ad for Apple Music this time highlighting The Darkness.
Serenity Caldwell, writing at iMore, on how an iTunes bug may be to blame for a small set of users finding their iTunes music deleted:
Apple Music is not automatically deleting tracks out of your Mac’s library, nor is it trying to force you to stay subscribed to the service. In this instance, it appears that Apple Music is an unfortunate scapegoat: The real problem may be a bug with the subscription service’s container application, iTunes.
I don’t want to incite mass panic, here: This bug appears to have affected a very small number of users, and if you didn’t have local files disappear after updating to iTunes 12.3.3, your library is likely just fine. You can check to see if your library is locally-stored by turning on the iCloud Status and iCloud Download icons; if you’ve been affected, I suggest restoring from a backup or following Apple’s Support document.
I’ve harped on it before but here I am again: please make sure you have backups of your data. I highly recommend something local (like a secondary hard drive) and also an off site backup like Backblaze.
Mark Gurman, writing for 9to5Mac, on how Apple Music’s Connect is expected to be “demoted” in iOS 10:
In the iOS 10 Apple Music redesign, the Connect feature will follow Ping’s lead and will be demoted. Apple Music Connect currently exists as its own tab across the Apple Music interface, but multiple sources say that the feature will lose its tab and become integrated into the “For You” recommendations page. Connect will still exist within applicable artist pages as it does today, but its demotion from the set of Apple Music tabs indicates that the feature has not lived up to Apple’s expectations from last year. Along with the demotion, Connect is unlikely to see notable new features this year.
Apple Music have announced a new student membership option that discounts the service by 50%.
That means in the U.S., where an individual membership to Apple Music costs $9.99 per month, the student membership will be $4.99 per month instead.
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.
Serenity Caldwell, writing for iMore, looks at what may have happened in regard to the blog post going around saying that Apple Music deleted a bunch of files off someone’s hard drive.
Whatever the case, Apple Music was never designed to delete Pinkstone’s source library, and it won’t delete yours. That’s simply not how the service works on your primary Mac. But if you’re not aware of how iCloud Music Library stores copies of tracks, you may delete your local copies to save space, thinking you can get them back — and get screwed as a result.
My guess is that there was a misunderstanding in how the system works, because the system is pretty stupidly confusing at times, and there is always the chance it was a bug. But there’s absolutely no way that deleting your music, without you expressly saying to do it, is “working as intended” as apparently the original author was told by tech support.
What I consider to be the killer feature of Apple Music, the combination of my local library with their streaming library, is also the feature that adds the most complexity to the service. While it does work, and I do use it, it’s far from perfect and definitely confusing. That’s on Apple to fix if they want you to trust your music library to their product. If they don’t have that trust then people will continue to use two apps: one for music they own and then Spotify for everything else.
