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It was Apple’s “One more thing…” during this year’s WWDC 2015 and after unveiling all the new developments in iOS 9, watchOS 2, and OSX El Capitan, the tech giant officially took the wraps off of Apple Music. It’s Apple’s long rumored subscription-based music streaming service that looks to compete with the likes of Spotify and Google Play Music All Access.
It’s kind of a big deal, with “tens of millions” of iTunes music available to stream or download for more convenient offline listening. That alone should be enough to appease music fans with more obscure tastes, or even those who are fans of big artists who only make their music available on iTunes. Apple Music will also feature it’s own 24/7 live streaming global radio station called BeatsOne with live DJs Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden, and Julie Adenuga playing curated music around the clock in over 100 countries.
Apple also has a new feature called Connect which sort of gives music artists — both signed and unsigned — their own social page where they can post basically whatever they like be it new tracks from an upcoming album, photos, lyrics, or remixes. Users can interact with these artists by liking or commenting on these posts, much like any other social app. The only difference is this is built into Apple Music and it’s another way the services looks to differentiate itself from all the others.
So you’re probably wondering why we’re telling you. That’s because in addition to iOS devices, Apple Music will also be launching on both Windows and Android this fall for only $10 (June 30th for iOS devices). Apple says the first 3 months will be free, with a 6-person family plan also available for $15.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqBtqJGFtgA
Is this the first time Apple has developed an Android app?!
I am pretty sure it is.
Yes. Can’t wait for another iOS port. If they follow Android design guidelines, I’ll let @Gamercore:disqus throw an Apple pie at my face.
Make sure Chris doesn’t tamper with it first ?
http://youtu.be/82oPNXUf0Ks
This is definitely a post-Jobs Apple.
That’s $10/month?
Is this a new app or an updated Beats Music?
Completely new app.
Hhh
This is actually good news. Google all access music doesn’t have a family share plan. This will put pressure on them to maybe launch that option ….. Which is something I want
i’m hoping it’ll help drive more competition in pricing – for example i wouldn’t mind paying 1/3 of the price for a much smaller potential library of music.
i’m one of those who views any recurring payment plan as something to desperately avoid, so if it isn’t absurdly cheap i don’t bite. i’ve used free trials of all access music and enjoyed it, but never found it worth paying for. apple’s version is no different for me, personally – same price, same chances of finding music i like (i’m not too picky).
if google responds with something like “all access lite” for $3/mo and offers only a small but rotating library of music, well then i might actually subscribe.
competition is a good thing :)
8.00 bucks is just right. It cheaper than a buying a album.
$800/mo?! clearly a typo. otherwise you’d be up to almost a third of a mortgage payment!
$8/mo is cheap IF you’d have spent that $8 on an album each month.
I bought loads of music decades ago – now i own the rights to play it royalty free all i like. I don’t buy many albums anymore. (might be about 1.5 years now since i bought a new album).
so for me $8/mo is exactly $8 more than I would have been spending otherwise.
a major goal in any of these subscription services is to get folks to spend a little money each when they otherwise would not have spent any. $8/mo fails to get me to open my wallet up. $3/mo… well that might get me. at least for a few months at a time. hell i might specifically sign up just for the winter each year (when i’m less likely to be fishing).
I think it’s the music labels that won’t allow them to charge less, so that might not be an option.
sure, that’s possible.
though a SMALL curated set of music could be VERY small and motivate the labels to change their position on the matter.
You seriously can’t afford $8 a month for every song in Google library? If $5 a month makes that much of a difference in your life, I am sorry. I really feel bad for you.
you feel bad for me. gee thanks.
i’m an engineer, home owner, and father. i don’t spend a dollar on something if i don’t have a need or an unfulfilled want which justifies that full dollar. (edit to clarify relevance: engineers are notoriously cheap; home owners are notoriously budget wise; fathers have plenty of OTHER stuff to spend their money on)
$8/mo for all access? sure, i can AFFORD it, but it’s not worth $8/mo to me. $3/mo I can also afford and it MIGHT be worth $3/mo to me. might not. might not be worth a penny to me, to be brutally honest. I’ve got a ~10GB collection of music (yeah, see I’m old enough to have actually acquired physical objects on which music used to be distributed; stuff like CDs and Tapes and gosh even Albums).
I tend not to listen to much music when driving (unless i’m on a spectacualrly long road trip). I don’t listen to much music at home (where I’m typically either brewing beer, fishing, or taking care of my son). I really don’t listen to much “music” at work either (where I generally play some ambient background stuff; anything too catchy or with meaningful lyrics would distract from a rather intense mental effort to get my work done).
So for me? yeah $8/mo would be a waste of money. Can I afford it? sure. I can also afford to just put $8 into the paper shredder each month. Not exactly a worthwhile endeavor, mind you, but I can AFFORD it.
thanks, though, for the mock pity. You’re a champ. Now go finish your homework so your mommy won’t dock your allowance again this week. Wouldn’t want to find yourself unable to afford that after school junkfood “snack”, all the other kids might pick on you for being poor or something.
I’m not sure but I may be older than you but… that’s not important. I too have over 14 gigabytes of real music that I’ve downloaded or ripped from CDs however during my many decades on this earth I have listened to most of them many times. Paying Google $8 a month to have nearly every single song on the planet at my fingertips at a moment’s notice is a pittance. if you cannot see the value in that I’m not sure you’re going to understand any argument I could make. A double Jameson cost more that than that at the bar, that is how I do my math. $8?! it’s a bargain.
the value of that music is entirely subjective.
how many hours do you spend listening to music a month? do you care at all about listening to NEW music, or are you perfectly happy listening to OLD music?
I probably listen to music (actual music, not background noise at work) for roughly 2-3 hours a month on average. I go months without listening to ANYTHING then maybe listen to a bunch of music while travelling or find myself bored when the weather ins’t conducive to fishing or brewing and listen to some music for a bit.
music just isn’t central to my daily life. i’d rather buy that Jameson then pay for music I won’t even be listening too. since I listen to music so little already, my large (to me) collection isn’t very stale to me: most of it hasn’t been played in YEARS and is pretty damn fresh to my ears when i finally play it.
sure – IF i listened to music part of EVERY day or at least EVERY week then it would be worth SOMETHING to me. $8/mo? meh, maybe, not sure. if music was central to my daily life – if i listened to hours of music a day – then $8/mo would be a STEAL.
my entire point from the start here was that I’m not the target audience for an $8/mo subscription to EVERYTHING. I just might be the target audience for a ~$3/mo subscription to a substantially small subset of that library.
I subscribe to Netflix for $8/mo and I get more than $8/mo of subjective value from that service (they could charge me more and I’d still pay for it). With various family members watching all sorts of shows I could easily see the value of paying twice that amount, maybe even 3x. Netflix is actually USED around here though.
Music? meh. My wife listens to Pandora and just deals with the ads. She doesn’t even hear them anymore. She’s so resistant to paying a subscription fee that she won’t even consume the 3 month trial offers she keeps getting for All Access. She figures, “why bother if i’m just gonna cancel after 3 months”?
We just aren’t the target audience for this price point. but we MIGHT be for $3/mo. Sure, we wouldn’t get access to the same library (maybe we’d get 1% of it?) but I don’t care about that – to me it’s all about justifying even that small expense and being able to say, “sure, i spent $36 this year on music, but i listened to a couple new-to-me songs without ads and that’s worth something to me”. Listening to “a couple new-to-me songs without ads” is certainly not worth ~$100/yr to me.
Because you can’t have enough music sources
No word on quality? Is it just going to be piddly 256kbps?
I can pretty much guarantee it won’t be lossless audio
I’m guessing they’ll have the option for high quality 320kbps. That’s what Beats Music currently offers.
Apple admits defeat! :)
I’m really hoping this is the beginning of something bigger. Like Apple services on Android. I mean, why not? Not every Android smartphone user has a Windows PC. Some of us own Macs.
It has to be reciprocal though.
No it doesn’t.Google has put all of its major apps on iOS for years including Google Now without it being reciprocal.
in that sense, Google has already reciprocated. They retroactively reciprocated since the dawn of iOS. and so if/when apple finally roles out general android compatibility for their suite of services we can all say, “this is reciprocal”.
but yeah, i don’t personally see apple enabling facetime or “messaging” on any other platforms. that’s their niche service which prevents would-be converts from leaving apple. @carl_rood:disqus is absolutely right: subsets of society (large ones at that) are entrenched in apple’s messaging and video calling infrastructure. from a business perspective they have nothing to gain but everything to lose by making it cross platform.
i actually converted a good number of facetime users to hangouts a while back. this was back when apple was sued for using another company’s video codec’s “without permission” (i don’t recall the story, whether it was legit or not, just that it happened about a year ago). the immediate curative was to fall back to another codec. that made facetime absolutely HORRIBLE and it was the perfect time to strike. i sold my wife’s side of the family on hangouts and they’ve been happily using the service since. at THIS point they are unlikely to go back to facetime simply because they enjoy the “many participants” feature of hangouts. yay win!
FaceTime is the most annoying program. I am software ambiguous meaning I am willing to use any program people feel comfortable with Hangouts, Skype and FaceTime. However I prefer android to iOS and will not buy into an ecosystem because one company refuses to release a basic program on other ecosystems. Would I use FaceTime on android yes I would but it won’t happen Apple wants my family to beg me to get iOS so they can FaceTime.
The big one is Facetime. Every one of my daughter’s friends has to have an iDevice because they don’t actually make phone calls. They text and Facetime. Getting a couple dozen girls I have not control over to switch to Hangouts isn’t going to happen.
Some of here use Linux PCs as well.
eh, i liked this better when it was called iTunes.
There goes the neighborhood
The family plan interests me but I’ll stick to my Prime Music which comes ‘free’ with the Prime membership I really care about.
If this comes out for Android in Japan, then the locals will lap it up. Google Music is still unavailable in Japa, as it’s media media industry is tightly controlled by corrupt old men on business and politics.
I still won’t use it, though, as even when basic internet/media services do manage to get through, the selection is a fraction of even developing countries’.