The Problems Apple Music Needs To Fix Before Launch

journovampire writes: In less than two weeks, Apple Music arrives for consumers, but it still has some serious problems. Many in the industry are predicting the biggest digital music launch in history, but Apple hasn't even achieved its primary stated goal of de-fragmenting the music market. To illustrate, the article points out that Apple Music catalog is currently missing the current most popular artist (Adele), the most popular artist of the past decade (Taylor Swift), and the most popular artist of all time (The Beatles). The company is also promising a three-month free trial period. Great for customers, but not great for musicians, who won't see a dime from that trial, regardless of how much their music is being played. Apple has likely made you-scratch-my-back deals with the major publishers, but indies have no bargaining power. They've been hesitant to jump on board, and that only decreases the selection. Add to that the complications by DRM, Apple Connect, and the new service flat out not working on some music devices (competitors to Apple, now that they own Beats), and you have a recipe for yet another troubled streaming site.

Comments

[citation needed]

[Noah Haders]

the current most popular artist (Adele)

[citation needed]

Add to that the complications by DRM.

what DRM? You stream the music through the iTunes app. If you want to buy a song or album you download it as a DRM-free mp3. I don't see the complication.

Apple Connect,

for the non-fanbois, apple connect is a social media network specifically for music and tied to apple music. Remains to be seen if it can take off considering it is not facebook/twitter.

and the new service flat out not working on some music devices

. It works on any apple device. it may also work on some androids, I don't know. check if your device supports it before you do the free trial. if your device doesn't support it, then use a different service (spotify, Pandora) that does support it. no big dea.

Re:[citation needed]

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is roasting Apple for a lot of things no one but the music industry really cares about, with the exception of getting big acts like Adele and Taylor Swift signed on. But really, whether they do or not, the buying public doesn't really care that much. It is a tempest in a teapot.

Why? Because Apple is the one with all the customers (maybe listeners) and 780B in the bank.
Adele and Taylor Swift do not have that. I don't think the listener will care *that much* that those two artists are not available when the rest of the world's catalogue is available for them to stream.

The independents don't want to sign on because Apple won't compensate them for the 3 months free trial. No money for 3 months, the horror.

The article makes it sound like everyone is on a 3 month delay without getting paid. This is not true, only the first three months of any new subscriber, Apple is not paying any royalties. Yes as the service launches NO ONE is getting royalty payments for three months. Guess what, listeners will give it a chance for 3 months because they are getting it for FREE.

Once the stream of money starts flowing no one is going to turn down the money stream. Rich artists like Adele may still not sign up, they no longer need to sign a deal that doesn't suit their terms anyhow, and dead artists don't care about their audience anymore because trust fund babies only want the money.

The rest of the industry will line up and lap Tim Cook and Jimmy Iovine's nutsacks because Apple will have a huge listening audience for the working artists.

Motown

[eples]

You can measure the quality of any streaming music service by typing the word "motown" into the search box.

Does Motown immediately start playing? A+
Is there a list of Motown playlists? A
Does something else happen? Fail.

Re:Speculation

[macs4all]

Just like the rest of the post.

Exactly!

TFA (where the "F" doesn't stand for "Fine") is nothing more than rampant, trollish speculation. There is simply no way that most of the "facts" in the article can be ascertained before launch.

And as for the absence of Taylor Swift, she is on record (no pun) as being very against streaming music, period, and has pulled all of her material from Spotify; so no wonder they don't have her signed...

tl,dr; Nothing to see here, move along.

I've seen this exact complaint before

[Applehu Akbar]

The problems in this article apply to any streaming service. It's what happens when a new technology collides with the writhing mass of overwrought little Hollywood egos that is the entertainment business.

Look at the example of television. Though in the old days we complained about having to sit through commercials, the sponsored broadcast model was one that everyone understood and was able to use nationwide without much thought. When cable came along, you had to pick out service tiers, but it brought TV to all those places where it had never seen seen before.

Enter streaming. For broadcast networks which have always used the sponsored-by-commercials model, this could have been a chance to use the reach of the Internet to provide "infinity" broadcast range to each over-air network. Networks began to make shows available on streaming after each air date, and it looked as though we were on our way to TV utopia. Miss a show and you can see it online; for sponsors, their reach is now vastly expanded both in space (programs becoming visible outside of city antenna range) and time (vacationers are watching your commercials after they get back to town and stream their favorites). As a bonus, Internet streaming gives broadcasters viewer metrics that make the old Neilsen diaries look like cave wall drawings.

But no service model is so simple and beautiful that Hollywood can't screw it up. Some shows can't be streamed because a TV "Adele" considers her ego worth trashing the service model for. Other shows disappear after a few episodes, so if you're away for a month you will never see them at all. Industry middlemen, the medallion cabdrivers of the business, want to flimflam double and triple sets of fees out of users, which is why a lot of over-the-air content hides behind those miserable "verify your cable provider" interfaces online. The result: we, the users, are sticking to our torrents until the mess clears up. If Apple wants to make music as simple and accessible to all by subscription as Netflix DVDs are for the movie business, it will have to strongarm Hollywood in the same way Netflix did, by becoming a default standard means of access that nobody will mess with.