Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Zune!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
I'm a 2000 man.
Are you sure?
You scratch my back and Ill scratch yours
Those aren't problems for *Apple*. They're "problems" for a very small segment of the consumer market and for indie publishers.
The revenue Apple would earn from getting those indie publishers on board is *paltry*, so I really don't think they give a damn about them.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I read the article and I am not at all convinced against Apple music. After all during free trial, who cares if I miss few artists. It is not that all of sudden all my other way of listening going to disappear. None of the problems mentioned in the article are bottleneck.
I don't use any paid streaming service as of now, but I am considering either Spotify and Apple music. But my decision will not have any bearings to whatever nonsense is there in the article.
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.
Adele, Taylor Swift, the beetles, and a few others are also nortorious for not allowing any online distribution of their music.
Seriously try to find them elsewhere? the big names don't have them or charge extra for them.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The problem with Apple gear is that it isn't compatible with Apple gear, let alone anyone else's. Once you buy into the Apple eco-system, you're screwed. Here are a couple of stories.
One friend had a MacBook which was 4 years old. She purchased a new Airport Extreme, Apple's home router. The only way to manage the Airport Extreme is with Apple's Airport Utility. The version of Mac OS X had an older version of Airport Utility that wasn't compatible with the router. Furthermore she couldn't upgrade the version of Mac OS X on her laptop to the current rev because it was 4 years old. In order to install the Airport Extreme, she had to borrow a new iPad.
Every other home router on the planet is managed through a web browser interface. There's NOTHING about the Airport Utility that you couldn't do with a browser interface, but noooo... It's an Apple product so you HAVE to use their app to manage it, and if you don't have a current Apple platform to do it from, you're screwed.
Another friend purchased a new iPhone 6 and found that iTunes wouldn't work for him with his laptop. Again, he had to upgrade Mac OS X. His laptop was new enough that it could go up to the current rev of OS X, so he got his iTunes working. But then his ProTools wouldn't work with the new OS X. Three years of studio recordings were lost.
Apple stuff is not only not compatible with other platforms, it's not compatible with itself. Anyone who buys into the Apple eco-system is going to run up against this kind of problem.
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.