Apple Makes Music Fans An Offer They Might Refuse
Paul Sweeting
Experienced business journalist and analyst specializing in intersection of media & technology. Co-founder of the RightsTech Project,
As expected, Apple’s new music strategy is to try to be all things musical to all people. Or almost all people.
The newly christened Apple Music, unveiled Monday at the World Wide Developers Conference, includes a $10 a month streaming service that offers on-demand access to Apple’s 30 million song library, along with cloud storage and playback of your own music collection and the option to let Apple’s experts curate personalized playlists for you. It also includes a free, ad-supported internet radio service featuring featuring celebrity DJs and what Apple is billing as the world’s first 24-hour global radio station, Beats One. It also includes a reboot of Ping, Apple’s failed social media platform, now called Music Connect and featuring artist pages.
You can also, of course, continue to purchase downloadable tracks and albums from the iTunes Music Store.
About the only thing Apple Music does not have is the sort of free, ad-supported on-demand tier that has helped make Spotify the world’s largest on-demand streaming service.
The lack of a free on-demand tier is partly Apple’s preference: It didn’t spend $3 billion to acquire Beats’subscription-only music service last year to get into the free streaming business. But no free tier was also part of Apple’s pitch to the record labels, publishers and artists, all of whom have been agitating to get more people paying for music online, notwithstanding consumers’ demonstrably limited appetite thus far for paid streaming: Give us what we need to crush our rivals, Apple suggested, and we’ll do for paid streaming what they couldn’t.
Apple being Apple, it will no doubt get its share of paying subscribers and perhaps even expand the market overall. At a minimum, some number of fanboys who currently use Spotify or Rdio will no doubt make the switch (shares of Pandora, Rhapsody and other rivals swooned in the wake of Apple’s announcement). But as Re/Code’s Peter Kafka noted in a smart post ahead of Monday’s reveal, simply “insisting that people pay for music won’t make people pay for music. Especially when you’re asking them to pay $120 a year for music — much, much more than music fans ever paid in the good old days of the CD era.”
Read the rest of this post at Concurrent Media.