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Posts tagged with "Apple Music"

Apple Opens @AppleMusicHelp Twitter Account to Answer Support Questions→

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:

Apple is continuing to expand its presence on social media services, today launching a brand new @AppleMusicHelp Twitter account to answer queries and support questions live over Twitter related to its Apple Music service. The account is manned each day of the week from 6 AM – 8 PM Pacific Time. Apple representatives will watch the account’s mentions timeline and try to help resolve people’s problems.

Good to see Apple valuing Twitter as a fast and efficient support system. There’s something to be said about the simplicity of asking a support question via Twitter versus opening a ticket or sending an email.

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iMore’s Apple Music Guide→

The iMore team has been doing a fantastic job at covering Apple Music and how the service works on various platforms and devices. Last week, they released an eBook version that collects of all their articles in one handy guide, expertly put together by Serenity Caldwell, Rene Ritchie, and the rest of the team.

I was on vacation when the iBooks version came out, but I still downloaded it and read it on my iPhone to see if there was anything I had missed in Apple Music and Beats 1. I discovered a lot of details I hadn’t paid attention to before, and I like how screenshots throughout the book always have informative callouts and descriptions. Fantastic resource (150+ pages) for anyone interested in or trying Apple Music, and just $4.99 on the iBooks Store. Recommended.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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