Apple music debuts – Is it the ultimate music service?

Apple launched iOS 8.4 yesterday, the major piece of it being the long awaited and highly publicized Apple Music service. While iTunes dominates digital music downloads, Apple did not offer a streaming service until 2013 with iTunes Radio. 

iTunes Radio took advantage of Apple’s 30 million song catalog and was integrated with the Music app on iOS and into iTunes on the desktop, but did not seem to set the world on fire competing with Pandora, Slacker, Rdio, and especially Spotify. Other entrants from competing platforms include Samsung’s Milk, Google Play Music, and Microsoft’s Xbox Music. Needless to say, there are a number of choices for streaming music.

Rapper Dr. Dre and record exec Jimmy Iovine achieved great success with Beats headphones, a fashion consumer electronics product, driving the headphone, speaker, and Beats branded audio systems business to revenues of $1 billion plus in the space of 8 years, despite the fact that Beats headphones are overpriced garbage. They moved into music streaming by buying out the assets of MOG, a well regarded streaming service that did not achieve high paid subscription levels competing with the likes of Spotify.

 MOG was rebranded into Beats Music and re-launched in 2014. Amid rumors that Beats sought to raise additional growth capital in an IPO, in May 2014 Apple announced that it was acquiring Beats for $3 Billion in cash and stock. It was Apple’s largest acquisition in its history, and began speculation about Apple’s plans for Beats music and the hardware business. Many speculated that a large part of the value Apple paid was to get Iovine’s contacts and clout with the music industry to hammer out the deals that could help Apple launch something that could better compete with Spotify.

This brings us to Apple Music. The service launched yesterday with Apple’s huge music catalog, and is deeply integrated into the music app on IOS and desktop iTunes. In this case, Apple is going cross platform offering access to the service on Windows, with an Android app to come in the fall. One of the unique features include Beats 1, a “global and live radio” station. Apple is also taking a cut at social again in this version of Music with Connect, after abandoning the failed iTunes Ping in 2012. But the major piece of what Music does is blend your own iTunes library with the rest of the cloud based catalog.

 Apple reportedly has 300 actual humans curating playlists by genre and mood, as opposed to more algorithmically derived playlists. Music borrowed some of the Beats music app UI that presents genres and artists for you to select in bubbles, one tap for like, two taps for love. After going through a series of these selections, you can then go to the New tab and pull down on the screen (the typical IOS update gesture) and get new playlist recommendations based on your tastes. Those playlists blur the line between your music ripped from CDs, purchases from iTunes, and music from the service, and that’s by design.