Jimmy Iovine seems to be doing the rounds of UK media at present. Following yesterday’s Evening Standard interview, he’s done another with Wired editor Michael Rundle.
Much of it is, of course, the usual sales spiel: curation is cool, nobody else will catch us or do it better, lots of great people involved – the kind of things you’d expect him to say. But the interview does contain one unexpected snippet: that Apple Music‘s curated approach could be applied to TV …
We all know one thing, we all have different television delivery systems, don’t we all wish that the delivery systems were better, as far as curation and service?” he says. “They’re all technically good. And Netflix is starting to cross the code because they’re starting to make some original content. It is really good, but still I mean none of us make movies here right, so we’re all punters, or what do you call them in the music business, fans right? We want to watch movies. Sit down with your girlfriend or a bunch of friends and try to find a movie online. That box helps you none — it doesn’t help. You’re on your own. And eventually that will catch them unless somebody digs in and really helps the customer. And entertainment needs that, it needs to live and breathe.
Apple has reportedly been working on its own web-based TV service for some time, initially expected to be announced back in June and subsequently delayed as we predicted back in May. While there has so far been no mention of content curation (beyond selection of the TV channels themselves), it’s unlikely that Iovine was making an off-the-cuff remark – especially as it wasn’t prompted by anything Rundle asked.
Iovine was, however, careful to imply that we shouldn’t expect to see any Apple Music-style curated TV service anytime soon.
I’ll tell you man, right now, this [music] is so daunting that I can’t even think about anything else.
The advantage Apple has with its curated music service is, he says, all about scale: having enough resources to do it properly. That can’t be done by algorithms, he argued, nor by small-scale human curation.
Algorithms are great but they’re very limited in what they can do as far as playing songs and playing a mood… And a lot of these companies they just go and hire somebody who used to work in the record business 25 years ago. Well, great. You have one person. We have hundreds… We have one of the great tech companies of all time building what we need
Iovine apparently kept a straight face while suggesting that music fans had been missing out by using cheap earphones – though his claims for the audio Beats headphone were, shall we say, modest.
They sound better than a $1 headphone, okay?
The music exec says Apple Music still has a lot of work to do – in particular, proving the value of the Connect feature, and “a bunch of things to build” to meet the promise of the service. But he thinks the “dream” they had when first creating the service can be achieved.
I think it’s never perfect. But I think you have a better chance of being perfect at Apple than anywhere else.
You can read the full interview at Wired.
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I’m waiting for the day Apple offers Music + Movies + Series unlimited streaming.
Are there really that many undiscovered TV shows you cant find out about through word of mouth that you need to pay a monthly fee to discover? 30M songs okay maybe, 150 good shows doesn’t really need curation
There is around 1300 series on Netflix and 2000 on Hulu. Discovery is a problem on Netflix. Feeling out all the generes and sub generes I like on Netflix, my recommendations still falls way short of what I like and what I’m interested in.
Bullcrap, I said GOOD SHOWS. 95% of whats on netflix and hulu is junk no one would ever want to waste their time watching. Discovery is most absolutely NOT a problem with TV shows. Go to work one day and youll hear people talking about every damn show they like constantly. You might just need to get out of your house more.
You’re the guy who’s still like “Hey everyone I just heard about this great show called Game of Thrones” Honestly, do you think there are hundreds of undiscovered The Walking Deads out there just waiting to be curated up for your viewing pleasure…..no its all junk, the good stuff is known. TV is not Music there isnt thousands of hidden gems waiting for you.
Everyone has different tastes on what they like, what you might consider good shows others might find them to be shit. Durations would be just for tv shows and would be for movies also. Finding shows and movies is a problem on Netflix and Hulu. New releases and recently added is a master clusterfuck on Netflix. Series and movies it suggests based on your viewing habbits or tastes is also a mess.
No kidding. I already went through Netflix and found most of their movies to be the worthless crap that I’m not interested in, which is why I cancelled Netflix. They aren’t getting a lot of the major stuff, they get a lot of low budget movies that are badly acted, etc.
IMNSHE, Apple Music’s curation is a big let-down and the usefulness of its playlists and stations pale in comparison to Songza – which they unfortunately let Google acquire. Beats was a $3B mistake. I just hope they can hide that so it doesn’t affect their stock in the long term.
There should be some kind of penalty for people on the internet who claim Beats was a $3B mistake with no evidence to back it up.
What part of “the headphone business alone will make it a profitable purchase..everything else is gravy” do you not comprehend?
Look at how much money Beats was making from headphones and then get back to me. Their headphone business was in no way, shape or form, in a position to earn them a $3B valuation. What you don’t know about business would fill the oceans of every planet in every solar system in every galaxy in this and any other universe.
Apart from the relatively income from Beats hardware being extremely modest, the quality of the product itself is complete crap – none of it was nor is it now up to the level of Apple’s other products, not in materials, components nor usability. Beats is a brand, like Monster is a brand, but their components, their drivers, may as well be commodity crap. This is probably something else you don’t know anything about, audio. So I won’t bore you with the details. More importantly, I won’t waste my time when you can just avail yourself of a simple search.
As I forgot to include it in my last post, the Beats deal was about putting down a big enough carrot to have the people that Apple wanted just drop everything and toe the company line. They didn’t care about the headphone business – that’s sofa-cushion money (aka chump change). They wanted the people, especially the loud mouths that carry some industry and “street” cred. But judging by what they’ll get out of it and what was produced in the form of their music service, it wasn’t money well invested. It’s not going to hurt their cashflow, but they could have spent far less on any number of alternatives and come away in the same or similar position they’re in now. I don’t see the upside to having gone with this particular acquisition.
My curated list keeps getting better and better all the time and find it to be one of the best features of Apple Music.
The choose artists bubbles needs updated to include more bands, but Apple Music quickly learns what you like and what you are interested in.
I keep getting recommendations for artists within lists that I most definitely do not like – and have used the “do not like” features on iOS numerous times. Most of what’s recommended in the way of deep cuts, albums and discographies, I already have in my library. Maybe this is best for someone who doesn’t have a music library, or if they do, a relatively small one. But my library isn’t small. I’ve been collecting music for 30 years and it’s all in my media library right now.
Further, give the competition a try. Spotify and Songza are both far superior in usability and results. This is true for the aficionado as much as the casual listener.
I prefer Apple Musoc to Spotify.
Curated Playlists (Watchlist?) are definitely the next step in video consumption. I don’t think its really going to be as much “discovery” like Apple Music is but more like a great editorial recommendation. A review of whats great out there, themed lists, and even promotional lists. Things like “Favorite TV dads” around Father’s Day, or Marvel’s Cinematic Universe when the next Avenger’s film comes out or even a Marathon of Bond films for Spectre’s release.
You can add playlists of favorite shows and movies of directors like Quentin Tarantino. You can also do groups like 70’s exploitation films like spaghetti westerns, Kung fu, etc.
Recommended sections already exist and so do promtional lists like fathers day/christmas/super hero. Netflix and Amazon spam me 5 times a day with these types of recommendations already. This is Apple marketing mumbo jumbo.
This guy is a bit of a tool. He’s trying to bring curated radio to streaming, which literally no one cares about or wants. It’s fun for a novelty, but so far they haven’t managed to make a playlist I care about.
I honestly did better with a service that let me pick a genre by era.
Hiring 100’s of people to curate? WTF? THat’s going to cost an obscene amount of money, they’ll never be profitable by doing that. And why does music have to be curated? I don’t have any problems searching for new music. If I’m listening to a song that I don’t know what it is, i pull out Shazam and it works most of the time and then it tells me what the music is, etc.
Other than that, I don’t have problems looking for music to listen to.
One of the reasons why is the lack of categories and the lack of accuracy. If you look at various places for categories of music, they just don’t have them categorized from the record labels with much precision and it’s hard to categorize some music. What one person thinks might be different than another. Some bands/artists are pretty straight forward. We all know BB King, for instance is blues. Pretty simple to categorize his music. But these others aren’t. Especially newer music where the artists aren’t necessarily fusing different forms of music. I know some of you will get pissed off, but this is the reality of the situation. Let’s say you know how to play jazz and latin music and you fuse them together, that creates Latin Jazz. Pretty simple. But a lot of people that are creating loops, sampling other people’s music and putting other stuff together and they really don’t know much about music, it creates something that’s hard to classify, so it might be not be easy to put it in a category or they conjure up some new category for some reason, but the content doesn’t get labeled on the files they distribute. So, the classification from the labels isn’t done very well. Yeah, in order to reclassify everything and to actually use standard classification taxonomy is probably impossible and would require a ton of knowledgeable people on each category, but finding those people would be expensive. Plus, they don’t typically classify music with much precision. Example, with classical, jazz, blues, rock, etc. there are sub categories that people can classify different songs/albums/artists, etc. So I don’t know how much precision Iovine and his hundreds of curators are going to get and how fast they can do it. What happens if they don’t classify things properly.
As far as a “mood” Good luck. How are they going to do that? Listen to everything? An average song is about 5 minutes (most shorter, but plenty that are much longer), they have over 40 MILLION songs on iTunes with more added daily. How many people is it going to take for them to listen to each song ONCE and then categorize it by mood? Come on. I think Iovine has been smoking too much Purple Kush. I think he’s just giving some lame excuse to hire a bunch of his buddies to pay them way too much money so he can feel powerful and useful.
Word to Cook, just put the entire catalog of music out and let people find what they want on their own and create their own library and playlists.
Judging from the results of some of the playlists, I doubt very much the selection were curated by hand. Maybe someone had their hands in there, but the selections were either randomly selected or computed. Usually the playlists are full of tracks I already own anyway, but regardless, the song selection is often bizarre and doesn’t fit the theme/subject of the playlist at all, and much less so that some other song by the same artist, usually from the same album.
Am I the only one who is sick of hearing the word “curate”?
“The biggest and most important thing, is what TV show/movie comes on NEXT”
I’m not a fan of Apple’s Curation in For You section. Yes, they have good creation teams for some of the playlists I have checked, but these are playlists I find on my own. It seems like Apple doesn’t take into account the recent songs I’ve added. All I get in my list is Hip Hop in the For You section… I like hip hop, but I also have a huge love for Jazz, Electronic, Experimental and etc. My tastes are eclectic, but looking at my For You section, you’d never know which is why I often avoid that section. The curation isn’t bad, but the good ones I have to find on my own.. “For You” section for me does no justice and I have liked lot of songs out of the hip hop genre to try and stabilize.. I do like Apple Music and I can see myself being a customer, because curation was never a big deal for me anyway.
I don’t listen to any sort of rap or whatever else you want to call it when someone talks over electronic noise but that’s the kind of stuff I’m constantly being offered in the “For You” section. So no, this recommendation does not work at all, all I get recommended to me is garbage I’d never consider listening to.
If this is what they want to do with TV then no thank you, I’ll continue being stuck with no TV service.