APPLE MUSIC FINDS ITS RHYTHM
New app strives to be ‘all the ways you love music, all in one place’
“There are too many places people have to go to experience music.” iTunes chief Eddy Cue
Here’s a throwback move. Apple is looking to reinvent radio.
In a much-anticipated announcement Monday, new Apple employee Jimmy Iovine told attendees at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference here that the new Apple Music app will mesh elements of existing on-demand services with a decidedly retro feature.
Apple Music takes the humancuration element of Beats Music, the subscription service Apple got in its $3 billion Beats Electronics purchase last year, and adds Beats1, a live DJ-helmed radio station aimed at giving music a cultural center that has been diluted since the digital revolution rocked the music industry.
“It’s all the ways you love music, all in one place,” Iovine said. “Algorithms can’t do it all. You need the human touch.”
Apple is coming from behind and late to the streaming scene, which is a typical approach for the company that was late to digital music players and smartphones but managed to crush both categories with the iPod and iPhone. Apple’s iTunes Radio, launched in the fall of 2013, never captured the mass attention of listeners.
“Apple faces strong headwinds in this space, with Pandora and Spotify well entrenched and other powerful players, such as Google, making a serious play for the music consumer,” says Paul Ver- na, senior analyst at eMarketer.
Forrester’s James McQuivey adds that if Apple beats Spotify, it won’t be “because it’s better, but because it can build its new music service into the hundreds of millions of devices that its loyal Apple users already love.”
Besides a station with London deejay Zane Lowe, other features of Apple Music include For You (curated suggestions based on your listening habits) and Connect (a forum for musicians to reach out to fans with new songs and other media).
“Today, there are too many places people have to go to experience music, and that’s the problem we wanted to solve,” iTunes chief Eddy Cue told USA TODAY.
Apple’s interest in music runs deep, from iPod to iTunes.
But after growing the store to mammoth proportions — today Apple claims about 80% of global download sales — the company has been faced with a consumer shift away from buying music (song sales are down 12% over last year) and toward streaming (up 54% in 2014, according to Nielsen SoundScan). A move was inevitable.
For Cue, Apple Music isn’t a new venture but the realization of 15 years of conversations that began when he and Steve Jobs invited record producer Jimmy Iovine — who went on to found Beats Electronics with rapper Dr. Dre — to see the first iteration of iTunes. “It all goes back to that beginning,” Cue explains, holding court in a Cupertino headquarters conference room last week with Iovine and musician Trent Reznor, who was integral to the creation of Beats Music. “And I can tell you, we are as excited now as we were when Steve and I launched that first store.”
Both Iovine and Reznor have spent much of the past few months in Silicon Valley fine-tuning Apple Music. While Iovine remains a fast-talking creature of the hard-charging music world, Reznor’s quiet demeanor meshes with the campus tech culture. He calls himself a “fanboy who can’t believe he’s working here.”
The three sketch out a new service that has its roots in the desire to simplify the streaming experience for both consumers and musicians.
Reznor laments how the “act of listening to music has been demoted.”
“Music isn’t just digital assets, something to buy online like auto parts,” he says. “It should be far more special.”