Shortly after Apple’s decision to let free ad-supported iTunes Radio stations go away, Soundcloud today has introduced a new similar feature called Stations for free on its own music streaming platform. Users can launch a new track station based off of the current song they’re listening to and easily discover an endless stream of new music.
This week Zac and Benjamin talk about the new versions of iOS and OS X along with some changes for iAds and iTunes Radio plus how Beats 1 can be improved. The Happy Hour podcast is available for download on iTunes and through our dedicated RSS feed.
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Apple continues to talk high praise of Apple Music, most recently leaking that the service has 10 million paying subscribers, but it has remained somewhat quiet about its Beats 1 online 24/7 radio station. Beats 1 launched to much fanfare with Zane Lowe leading the effort, and while it seems to be doing decently, it isn’t a sensation in the music business yet. It’s especially timely to talk about Beats 1 now that Apple has retired the iTunes Radio ad-supported stations, leaving Beats 1 as the only way to get free streaming music from Apple. I’m intrigued by the uptake of the station — there’s a poll to find out how often you tune in below the break — as it seems Beats 1 has an awareness issue.
I tend to like the music that is played but I just forget to tune in. I think Beats 1 is good but Apple needs to support it better within iOS and iTunes to make it stickier. Here are some suggestions …
When it was discovered that Apple applied for trademarks for Beats 2, 3, 4, etc, it seemed pretty obvious the company was considering expanding its 24/7 Beats 1 radio station that it’s promoted as a key part of its new Apple Music service since launch.
And it’s not a stretch to imagine how it could easily expand on the mainstream programming found on Beats 1 currently. Think of a 24/7 station that focuses specifically on one genre like rock, jazz, or hip-hop, for example, with shows programmed to focus on subgenres or featuring guest hosts and regular segments much like Apple’s Beats 1 station. To me this seems like a natural progression for Beats radio as part of Apple Music, but it’s possible Apple could also include more than just more music with Beats 2, 3, and beyond.
When Apple Music launched earlier this year in June, one of the major features of the package that differed from other streaming services was a real streaming radio station called Beats 1 hosted by actual DJs including Zane Lowe.
The Beats 1 station is free and doesn’t actually require an Apple Music subscription, but Apple has used celebrity-hosted radio shows by Dr. Dre, Pharrell, Jaden Smith and others on the streaming station to attract people to the subscription service.
Now a new report from French site Cosnomac (via MacRumors) says Apple has applied for trademarks in the US for use of Beats 2-5.
Sonos is beginning to roll out support for streaming Apple Music content to its wireless speakers starting today. The feature is available in beta and limited to select Sonos customers who signed up earlier this month when the update was first announced. Sonos will continue to add more people to the Apple Music beta ahead of a wider release to all Sonos customers early next year. I’ve had a chance to try out the Apple Music beta with Sonos, which works through the updated Sonos Controller app, and in some cases it looks better than Apple’s own app.
Later today Apple is set to pull the plug on Beats Music and completely stop the service. The reason? After buying the subscription music service in a $3 billion deal that also included Beats headphones and speakers last year, Apple Music has now fully launched and replaces Beats Music. Any remaining subscribers will need to transfer from Beats Music to Apple Music immediately to avoid losing saved music libraries and playlists. The good news is Apple Music now has almost all of Beats Music’s features with only a few exceptions…
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While it appears to be an entry-level position, it will likely be a hot one for anyone looking to get a job in radio: Apple just posted a job listing looking for a production assistant that will work directly with famed radio personality Zane Lowe and the team producing the 24/7 Beats 1 radio station that Apple launched alongside its Apple Music streaming service back in June.
The job listing posted on Apple’s website is seeking a production assistant for Beats 1 to work specifically on Lowe’s show. That includes “creative content ideas, editing, and execution of both audio and video,” and it also means the position will be at Lowe’s Beats 1 studio located in LA. Apple gave a brief tour of the studio back in July.
Zane Lowe was hired away from his popular show on BBC Radio 1 to run the live streaming radio offering included with Apple Music. The DJ and radio personality recently gave his take on how things have been going so far noting that Apple told him not to worry about numbers, but simply to “go out and make noise.”
Following that interview, Apple earlier this month revealed for the first time that it has 6.5 million paying Apple Music subscribers and 15 million total users since launching in late June. It didn’t, however, break out any numbers related to Beats 1 specifically.
In a Radio Festival interview in London by Zane Lowe‘s former boss, Lowe told Radio 1 head Ben Cooper that Beats 1 is like a new-born baby.
We’ll grow up, but right now we’re three months old, and babies make a lot of noise, they look at the world all wide-eyed and they shit everywhere. That’s kind of what Beats 1 is, it’s very, very new, 13 weeks man, it’s crazy. It’s all new and weird – and no rules man, no rules.
He said that despite the high-profile nature of the station, he wasn’t taking its future for granted. Asked why Apple Music needs Beats 1, Lowe said he wasn’t sure that it did …
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It was a surprise to learn last week that Apple Music exec and Beats 1 head Ian Rogers was leaving Apple just two months after the launch of the company’s streaming music service. What’s equally surprising is where he’s going: Re/code reports that he is joining French luxury giant LVMH.
Rogers will leave California and move to Paris, where he will be chief digital officer at LVMH, the holding company behind iconic luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs and Bvlgari.
This confirms earlier reports that he was joining a European company in an unrelated industry.
The fit is far from obvious. The former Beats Music CEO has spent his entire career in the music business, and while some had speculated that the move from CEO to senior exec might have been a difficult one, there’s as yet no suggestion that Rogers will be resuming a CEO role within LVMH.
The get is a bit of revenge for LMVH which has seen a number of execs leave for Apple ahead of the Apple Watch introduction.
Photo: FastCo
Update:
[tweet https://twitter.com/iancr/status/638731449496014848 align=’center’]
In case you weren’t tuned in to the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards last night (it’s okay, I missed them too), Apple has shared its two-part Apple Music promo video that ran during the music awards show on Sunday night. Both clips together run two minutes in total and feature hip-hop artist The Weeknd (who performed at Apple’s 2015 WWDC) plus a cameo from actor John Travolta in one.
Aside from pushing the Apple Music three-month free trial in front of MTV’s audience, the promo shows The Weeknd using the Beats 1 radio station and Apple Music to create a playlist to post on the artist activity portal Connect. It also introduces a new tagline of sorts for Apple’s streaming music service: ‘It’s all in your head. Create your own party. Unlimited music for $9.99.’ That’s quite the pitch.
Since launching the music streaming service earlier this summer, Apple has focused much of its advertising energy on billboards, TV spots, and publicity for Apple Music. The next big boost will likely come from the iPhone 6S event next week. The MTV VMAs connection dates back to Beats 1 exclusively announcing the nominees in July which may have caused a services outage.
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Apple has once again distanced itself from its past efforts in order to market its new Apple Music streaming service. The company has begun promoting the service using a unique geofilter in the popular Snapchat messaging application. The geofilter has showed up in select areas of Los Angeles, including at The Grove mall where an Apple Store is located.
Hip-hop artist Dr. Dre’s controversial and storied past was bound to become an issue for Apple at some point after it bought the company he co-founded for $3 billion last year. Now Apple is hoping it can let the rapper’s history live in the past, which is especially tricky as it promotes the biofilm “Compton” depicting the rapper’s entrance into fame.
The biographical film, which was produced with close cooperation from Dr. Dre, has been criticized for omitting decades old allegations that the artist physically abused women. Today both Dr. Dre and Apple released statements addressing the controversy, Dre saying that he deeply apologizes for his actions 25 years ago and adding that “it has forever impacted all of our lives” while Apple said that “we have every reason to believe that he has changed.”
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Wired’s new cover story featuring Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre includes interviews with the Beats co-founders turned Apple executives and also some quotes from others on the Apple Music team. The article has a lot of backstory on the duo pre Apple’s acquisition of Beats, much of which we’ve heard in the past, but mostly discusses the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, an undergraduate program the two Apple executives have started at the University of Southern California.
“If you tell a kid, ‘You’ve got to pick music or Instagram,’ they’re not picking music,” Iovine says. “There was a time when, for anybody between the ages of 15 and 25, music was one, two, and three. It’s not anymore.”
The school aims to create a new generation of creative executives by assembling a faculty drawn from the schools of art, business, and engineering in an ambitious new curriculum. This, Iovine says, will be his true legacy, a pipeline of professionals, equally at home in the worlds of tech and culture, who can steer the music industry through whatever displacements lie ahead. “If the school doesn’t work, to me the whole thing failed,” Iovine says. “Because then you’ve got to pray for freaks, and that’s no way to run a business.”
You can read the full Wired cover story online here.
Apple is continuing its promotion of Apple Music this weekend. After putting out a trio of television advertisements promoting Apple Music and its artist-integrated Connect platform, the company has announced a pair of statistics for the launch weekend of its employee Dr. Dre’s new Compton Album. In a statement, Apple says that Compton was streamed 25 million times over the course of its opening week as an Apple Music exclusive. The album was also downloaded half a million times via the iTunes Store.
In a new interview with Billboard, Beats 1 head anchor and “special creative” Zane Lowe has shared some new information and backstory regarding Apple’s (almost) always-on radio station and streaming music service. In the interview, Lowe discusses the motives behind playing the music he plays on his show, as well as some of the behind-the-scenes aspects of being in charge of the entirety of Beats 1.
Apple has released an update to iTunes to accompany today’s iOS 8.4.1 release. Like the iOS update, the new version of iTunes introduces bug fixes related to Apple Music and the Beats 1 streaming radio service.
Apple has released an official iOS update for all users with iOS 8.4.1 now available. The update follows the major iOS 8.4 release which included an all-new Music app with Apple Music, the new subscription music service, plus Beats 1, Apple’s Internet-based radio station with live DJs. Apple initially started testing the changes in iOS 8.4.1 with developers in mid-July. The maintenance update includes several issue fixes for Apple Music and Beats 1.
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Rdio has likely been feeling the squeeze from the launch of Apple Music, and is today adding live streams of 460 traditional AM/FM radio stations, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The rollout, which starts Wednesday, includes 460 stations owned and operated by stakeholder Atlanta-based Cumulus Media Inc [including] long-running stations such as Cumulus’ KLOS-FM (95.5) in Los Angeles and KFOG-FM (104.5) in San Francisco, along with talk radio and sports outlets …
When Beats 1 launched earlier this summer, two of the things Apple and its hosts were adamant about were that the station had no specific genre and that it was meant to be a global representation of music. Looking to investigate Apple’s success at following through with those goals, Quartz has analyzed all of the songs played on Beats 1 during a one month period from early July to early August…
Would you switch to Apple as a cellular provider? That’s the big question this week. Apple denied these reports, but there may be some details in this denial that lead other places. Speaking of unannounced and rumored Apple products, it looks like there’s new information on Project Titan, which could be a Cupertino-made electric car. The Happy Hour podcast is available for download on iTunes and through our dedicated RSS feed.
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Apple this week appears to have started uploading full “replays” of Beats 1 shows to its Connect social network. Apple Music hosts including Zane Lowe, Julie Adenuga, and Ebro Darden have all shared full, unedited replays of their shows on their respective Connect pages over the past two days.
Anonymous “sources with knowledge of the situation” have told The Verge that there are some bright points to consider in the otherwise troubled start of Apple Music. Pointing to the comparatively successful launch of the streaming radio station Beats 1, The Verge suggests that Apple’s contracts with major music labels included the right to launch up to five more stations — for instance, “a Beats 2 station headquartered in Australia or Asia,” or seasonally available stations. The report claims that labels already receive more money for plays on Beats 1 than on Pandora, hinting that the launch of additional stations could be lucrative for artists…
Apple has published a behind-the-scenes look at Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 studio where Apple Music’s streaming radio station is broadcasted … on Snapchat of all places. Apple snatched up the ‘applemusic’ username on Snapchat earlier this summer, and now the company is using the account to promote its subscription music service and Zane Lowe’s radio show with short videos of the DJ broadcasting.
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