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Yesterday, at Apple’s developer conference – WWDC for those that didn’t know – Apple unveiled their much anticipated streaming music service, simply called Apple Music. You may remember a little while ago when Apple bought a company named Beats. Well they are putting that acquisition to work now. They are part of the work behind Apple Music. Their announcement wasn’t too surprising, but the surprises were in the details.
This morning, TechCrunch wrote up a nice article detailing its strengths and weaknesses in compared to other products out there like Spotify, Google Play Music, Tidal and Amazon Prime Music. As a non-Apple fanboy, I actually agreed with them, for the most part. One of the bigger strengths of Apple Music is that it’s available on just about every platform. When Apple announced it yesterday, they said it’d be coming to iPhone and iPad as well as part of the new iTunes in Mac and Windows. But the surprising part was that it was coming to the Google Play Store. Apple is following Google’s path of putting their services on other platforms.
TechCrunch says that a couple of their weaknesses are the pricing and lack of exclusives. Apple Music pricing is $9.99 per month. The same as everyone else. Now Apple isn’t hurting for money, so they could have very easily priced it at $5.99 per month, and still probably made plenty of money. While we’re talking about Apple’s wallet, there are no exclusives to make you want to try Apple Music if you’re already invested in another service like Google Play Music or Spotify. Apple has the money to get exclusives, but they just didn’t. Looks like Tidal is the only one doing exclusives right now.
When Apple announced Music, most of us figured we would never get the chance to try the service as it would be iOS only. But it will be launching in the Play Store on June 30th. Apple actually put together a decent service and Android fans are taking notice. We put out a poll in our Apple Music vs Google Play Music post yesterday, and at the time of writing this, nearly a third of our readers are looking forward to Apple Music. Now that’s pretty surprising.