Free, three-month trial of Apple Music now available
apple.com
apple.com
It also seems like they're relying on the fact that people already know what the service does, as the copy isn't terribly informative either (at least at first glance). I hope the end product is worth it though.
EDIT: That was in IE10, so not fair. Here's the screenshot in FF37: http://i.imgur.com/564O1ck.png It's still hard to read, though better than the first.
Not only that, but it starts playing a video that ends up in a mostly-black static background, and I can't even manage to get a screenshot fast enough that shows it with the piano background.
Now I'm thinking my corporate firewall is playing shenanigans.
Guess 12.2 will come out later today. Updating to OS X 10.10.4 did not come with it.
1. One app will think my account is "in" the U.S., sends me to the App Store for an update. 2. App Store checks and sees that, oh, nope, this is a German account, but maybe try back in few days.
They encountered a problem, or the teams doing the updates are out of sync. Or they're scrambling to get it out due to some caching problem. Who knows really any number of things could be going wrong.
All the other features are nice add-ons.
Spotify is the incumbent. They built an awesome product before on-demand music streaming was widely available. It will be very difficult for Spotify to compete? Spotify/Google Play/Rhapsody have a multi-year advantage in user acquisition and product development. Apple may be Apple, but if their biggest differentiator is that downloaded songs integrate into my iTunes library, that's not enough for me to switch over.
I'm on Google Play and have no plans to leave. Not because I love the service, but because my music is already there and I don't see anything about this service that's new or different enough to pull me away.
Using every other service requires downloading that service's app and while that isn't a huge barrier for those of us in tech, that is a HUGE barrier for everybody else. Plus think about all the grandparents, soccer moms, and teenage girls that use iPhones and don't really consider any other phone. Those people probably aren't the people that are using Google Play or Spotify, but now they have Apple Music on their phone and ready to go. With all the attention Apple Music has been getting from that whole Taylor Swift Fiasco, there's no doubt that almost everyone has heard of it already and eagerly awaiting its arrival.
If you're a techie and you own an Apple device, then why partition your music selection with Spotify? Apple Music has almost every song Spotify does plus Apple has a better relationship with the record companies, so you know you're money isn't going to a company that's under some serious pressure to change their business model. Plus Apple Music has music videos and a social component for artists to reach out to their fans - which is kinda slick in my opinion. If none of that moves you then okay, try it for free for 3 months. Three months!! No matter what you think about Apple Music's competitors, why not stop paying them for a month and try out Apple Music? I'd wager many people aren't going to move after that.
Apple Music's future success won't depend on the service it's self, but on fitting into Apple's ecosystem and Apple's ability to reach the general public in ways that other streaming services can't. Plus, iPhones are the best selling phones in the United States so a lot of people will have this service already. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of the week, more people have Apple Music on their phones than Spotify.
Spotify is in serious trouble. That's BEFORE we start discussing how record labels want Spotify to kill its free tier and how many users will flee the service when that happens.
I'm not sure the exact rules it uses for this. An event of mine at 2pm tomorrow wasn't sufficient to show it, but I added a test event in 1.5 hours and it showed that one. It might be the same criteria that Notification Center uses to determine when to show an upcoming event.
I don't know if it prioritizes explicit searches in any way, but automatically suggesting my upcoming event's location without having to type anything at all is pretty good.
(Note: I tested this on the iOS 9 beta, but I know I've seen this behavior in iOS 8.3 in the past)
But, the thing is, they're not. Apple is the one fighting the uphill battle in streaming music. Yesterday they had no subscribers. Today they have nobody paying them for the service. They are playing catch-up.
My grandmother may have an iPhone and may be forced into having Apple Music on her phone. Her computer-literate grandson might even show her how to use it. But it's a very large bridge to cross to go from pushing software to somebody's phone to getting them to pull out their credit card and subscribe to a service.
And by the way, the comparison to Maps made below holds no water. Maps is free, interchangeable with Google Maps, has zero switching costs, and is often opened by mistake because it is, after all, designed to replicate Google Maps.
I'm willing to wager by end of year, Apple Music will be used 2x more than Spotify on iPhones. That is, I'm guessing by end of year Spotify will have stalled at around 25 million paying subscribers, and Apple will have around 50 million+. And the curve for Spotify will be flat, or descending, while Apple will still be arcing up.
I guess we'll see though.
Apple surely has a lot going for it, but let's not forget that Spotify has a partnership with Uber and is a very innovative company in it's own right. Apple Music just launched. Spotify has been around for 4+ years. Late to market entrants don't have a great track record of user acquisition.
But, the thing is, they are. I'm a long-time Spotify fanboy and cancelled my subscription after 30 minutes of playing with Apple Music. Have you spent time with Apple Music? I'm not really sure what Spotify could even do to make me return?
Overall - loving Apple Music, I'm 90% likely to subscribe for $120/year, coming from someone who spends about $20-$30 a year on a few select tracks and the rare album.
"My Music" is for things you own or already access. "For you" is for new things Apple thinks you might like based on your preferences. "New" is for completely new things to add to your collection.
Yeah, they do.
Google Play Music also lets you incorporate your own local files into your song library, as well as making them them available on all of your other devices.
And FWIW, a quick DDG search shows that people use WINE to run iTunes on Linux (though these results are several years old). So if you really want to try out Apple Music, it seems you can do so. But I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to go to that effort.
OTOH, they are going to provide an Android app in the fall. Maybe they'll provide something web-based as well.
I was a Spotify user, but the ability to bring up an artist and or any song via my voice makes for safer driving and I think it's pretty cool!
I'm guessing it's because I clicked on Drake.
Ballsy recommendation, regardless. Also, pretty good.
But - overall, the App's pretty fantastic. Every Song I've looked for by every artist is there. Great Integration with my (extensive) iTunes library. And Free for three months. I'm going to cost Apple a fortune (Well, $0.002 * a heckuva lot of plays) over the next three months.
But I'm still confused as to why there is a "New" and a "For You" tab.
[Edit - Seriously, everything seems to be here. All of Taylor's stuff of course, but AC/DC, you name it. I'm guessing there is very little that Spotify has that Apple Music doesn't. ]
[Edit 2 - Holy Crap offlining is easy. You just "Add to my Music, Make Offline - boom. Downloaded onto your iPhone. I've just dumped a bunch of live albums. I wonder what the limit is...]
There are still a number of albums/songs/artists missing that simply aren't available anywhere (Tool and The Great Gatsby soundtrack are two I always check).
But it seems that I should be able to mix tracks I own with streamed tracks, which is going to be the killer feature for me personally.
Having used Rdio for many years now, and Zune Pass previously, comparing apples-to-apples (no pun intended) with will be interesting.
:)
Although I will say I'm hoping apple does more with the whole Music Connect and actually following artist that Spotify and other services currently don't, I'm going to hear about the new album regardless of whether or not I follow them on your service, update me with interviews they do, or if a concert is in my area, rather than just updating me whenever their album eventually hits your servers.
The question becomes can they maintain the quality? They definitely need to hire add more diverse DJs and expand the number of countries they broadcast from if they want to be the radio station of the world.
On-boarding was typically Apple. No frills, minimal signup screen. This is followed by the Beats-style bubble genre/artists selector. That screen was fun, but I was a little confused by the search icon in the nav-bar, which I thought would allow me to add bubbles, but seemed to just span out into something else entirely. I backed-out of it and just continued with the few bubbles I had selected.
Like I said, music quality and selection seems solid so far. The app feels rather big -- this may prove to be a plus or a minus, but at the moment leads me to want to explore it a bit, which is seems like a plus for a content app.
There are some new UI patterns I haven't seen in an Apple app before, particularly the minimize icon when you're in the song player -- which is a modal rather than push on the navigation controller.
I am just guessing that they're using a custom transition on a modal presentation and using UIPercentDrivenInteractiveTransition to let you drag it up or down.
It's about to start and I'm very curious whether I'll like it or not, because I didn't listed to any radio station for a long time.
In this case, the window title of the page is "Apple - Music", but the page headline, which can reasonably be considered the title of this "article", is "Free, three-month trial of Apple Music now available."
So it seems to me that this change is perfectly in line with HN's normal policies.
Coming
this fall.
And I can't be the only one who is wary of running an OS update first thing in the morning on workday. Granted, Apple have been very good about their updates, I haven't had one screw up yet, but the last thing I want to worry about is possibly having a dead phone all day.
Also, you should perhaps wait to criticize Apple's iOS release timing until, you know, they actually have a problem. To be fair.
Zane Lowe is a very important part of this launch, and the Radio is a major component of Apple Music. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zane_Lowe
Regardless - First Bug. I'm getting an "Unknown Error (403) " when trying to listen to the radio.
Presumably "403" is HTTP forbidden error. And, perhaps because I'm playing from Singapore? Kind of funny that all of the music, downloads, streaming everything appears to work fine from Singapore, but the Radio doesn't.
[Edit - Yup. Adding a VPN (VyprVPN) and connecting through Australia resolved the 403 issue. I'm good to go, Radio One works fine now]
[Edit 2 Just in time to hear the first replay of Pharrell's "Freedom". Yay - I'm chair dancing. ]