Spotify

Bowers & Wilkins, maker of the iconic Zeppelin speaker and its AirPlay sequel Zeppelin Air, today announced an upgraded model with even more horsepower and features: Zeppelin Wireless ($700). The original $600 Zeppelin redefined “high-end iPod speakers” at a time when Bose and Klipsch had established a $300 to $400 price ceiling, successfully upping the ante in both sound quality and industrial design.

Zeppelin Wireless retains B&W’s classic elongated football shape and five-speaker concept, but now relies entirely on wireless streaming for audio, boasting Bluetooth aptX, AirPlay, and Spotify Connect support. Backed by 150 Watts of amplifier power, a new twice-as-powerful digital signal processor upsamples all inputs to 24-bit/192kHz resolution, promising to deliver greater accuracy, lower noise, and enhanced dynamic range through an audiophile-quality DAC. The speakers and enclosure have been upgraded, as well…

Expand
Expanding
Close

When Apple Music officially launched earlier this year, we ran a poll seeing where people were switching from to use the service. A surprising 33 percent of the 18,000 responses said they were switching from Spotify to Apple Music, while another 23 percent said Apple Music was their first streaming service. At the time, however, anyone using Apple Music was getting it for free. In fact, 17 percent of people said they were using the service, but only during the trial.

As we noted earlier today, however, the first 3 month free trials are wrapping up, which means it’s time to see who’s sticking with Apple’s streaming music service and who’s leaving…

Expand
Expanding
Close

While Apple Music’s content library may be plenty, there’s undoubtedly issues with the software behind it as the product is new and faces the hurdle of integration with lots of legacy iTunes cruft. Some may find that okay during the start of the three-month free trial period, but Apple’s streaming music service will have to shape up and quick if it wants to compete with Spotify and others in the same space. Oliver Schusser, iTunes International VP, tells The Guardian that Apple is currently working to clean up and improve the overall product:

“There’s a lot of work going into making the product better. Our focus is on editorial and playlists, and obviously we have teams all around the world working on that, but we’re also adding features and cleaning up certain things,” Oliver Schusser, vice president, iTunes International, told the Guardian.

Schusser is likely referring to improvements coming to the Music app in iOS 9, which Apple is expected to preview again next week and release later this month ahead of the iPhone 6S, but the exec also mentioned the upcoming Android version, Apple Music Connect, and Sonos support.
Expand
Expanding
Close

If you want a Wi-Fi-based multi-room audio system, you so far haven’t had many alternatives to the market leader, Sonos. Other manufacturers offer their own solutions, but generally only in a handful of products. That looks set to change as Yamaha today announced that its MusicCast system will be supported by more than 20 products, with pricing starting from $250. That includes all but one of its 2015 receivers, reports CNET.

Unlike Sonos, MusicCast supports five different lossless audio formats, including Apple Lossless, FLAC and WAV. It’s controlled by an iOS app, which can stream both your own music library and services like Spotify, Pandora and Rhapsody. Support for Apple Music seems likely further down the road … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

A new study from research firm MusicWatch shares some insight into Apple Music usage, including the percentages of users the subscription streaming service has been able to attract from Apple’s old iTunes music platform and competing services.

Around 11 percent of iOS users report actually using Apple Music (although 77 percent were aware it had launched), and that number is approximately the same among users purchasing or managing their music through iTunes. Compare those numbers to the approximately 40 percent of iOS users that MusicWatch says buy music in the form of digital downloads through iTunes.

In addition, the report notes that usage among existing iTunes Radio users sits at 18 percent. That would mean Apple Music has only attracted a small portion of iTunes users in general. While the numbers compared to iTunes usage are low, MusicWatch notes that the service has been able to convert around 52% of users that gave the service a try since launch. To me, that’s a good sign that the biggest hurdle is actually getting users to try the service. But how does usage relate to that of competitive services?…

Expand
Expanding
Close

The European Union’s inquiry into whether Apple had colluded with music labels to suppress competition from streaming music services like Spotify has concluded that no evidence exists to support such claims.

The investigation involved the questioning of executives from several of Apple’s partner labels to determine whether App Store limitations might “lock out” competitors.

Expand
Expanding
Close

September cover of Vanity Fair

Taylor Swift is being featured on the cover of the September issue of Vanity Fair (view the full cover below the fold), and at the center of the interview within the high profile magazine is the pop star’s telling of her recent episode with Apple. Plans to not compensate artists during Apple Music’s three-month free trial period prompted Swift to publish an open letter explaining why her latest album 1989 wouldn’t be available on their new music streaming service. Apple quickly moved to change that policy and Swift’s album was notably highly promoted on Apple Music at launch. In the interview with Vanity Fair, Taylor Swift detailed her exchange with Apple while comparing it to a similar experience with Spotify that had a different outcome…
Expand
Expanding
Close

Screenshot via <a href="http://recode.net/2015/07/20/spotifys-personalized-computer-generated-playlists-are-here-and-theyre-pretty-good/" target="_blank">Re/code</a>

With custom playlists at the center of Apple Music’s discovery experience, Apple’s biggest streaming competitor Spotify is also focusing its efforts on playlists for its latest feature called Discover Weekly. It’s not exactly a “me too” feature, though, as Apple’s and Spotify’s approaches each differ in how playlists are created. While Apple highlights having human editors curating its featured playlists, Spotify is basing its new feature around listening behavior to deliver weekly recommendations…
Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple Music has been available to the public for almost three weeks and while subscriber data hasn’t been revealed by Apple, early reviews were generally positive. The service is not without its flaws, however, and users have been quick to point them out. With the service having been available for a couple of weeks, though, we’re curious: Are you using Apple Music? If so, did you switch from another streaming service to Apple’s or is this your first venture into streaming music?

Expand
Expanding
Close

Misfit, makers of the popular Flash and Shine wearables for fitness and sleep tracking, today launched a new iOS app that turns its Flash hardware into a remote control for a connected iPhone’s camera, music functions, and more.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Freedom?

The US antitrust regulators are reportedly looking into Apple’s subscription service rules for the App Store are anticompetitive and illegal under US law, according to Reuters. The main issue of contention is that the standard streaming music price of $9.99 per month is not attainable for Apple Music competitors as App Store rules enforce a 30% cut of all revenues made from within apps.

This means that streaming companies either have to take on significant profit cuts to stay at the $9.99 mark or charge more in the App Store to account for the 30% margin. The argument is that consumers will not want to pay $12.99 (approximately $9.99 with a 30% increase) per month for a streaming music service when they can readily buy Apple Music for $9.99.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Faced with a direct challenge from Apple Music, rival Spotify will contact App Store subscribers to its Premium music service to suggest that they switch to $10/month web billing rather than $13/month iTunes billing, reports The Verge. Spotify is marketing the switch as a way for Apple users to save $3 per month on its Premium service, giving Spotify a greater ability to compete with Apple Music’s $10/month offering.

Expand
Expanding
Close

I gave my first impressions of Apple Music on day two, and my main disappointment remains: despite putting both owned and streamed music into a single app, there is absolutely no real integration between the two. All the evidence suggests that Apple Music has no awareness of my owned music.

I’ll get past that in a moment, but bear with me first for a couple of paragraphs. Because this is, in my view, more than just a missed opportunity: it’s almost criminally negligent. iTunes knows more about my musical tastes than my girlfriend. More than my neighbours, who have sometimes been more familiar with my musical tastes than they might wish. More than any of my friends – even the one who kindly ripped all my CDs for me on his high-end PC with multiple DVD drives.

Think about that for a moment. iTunes knows every single artist, album and track I own. Not only that, but it knows which ones I have put into what playlists. It even knows the exact number of times I have played every single track! And Apple uses none of that data in guiding its Apple Music suggestions. That really is a huge fail, given what could have been.

Ok. I’m over it. I won’t mention it again, I promise. But seriously, Appl- Ok, sorry. That’s it now. So, let me set that aside, accept that Apple Music needed to learn my tastes from first principles, and talk about how well it’s doing a week in … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

Last week, we noted that Apple’s latest iOS 8.4 release with Apple Music removes support for the long-existing Music Home Sharing feature. This function allows an iOS device user to stream music from a computer running iTunes on their own WiFi network. Today, Apple Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services noted on Twitter that Apple is “working” to restore Home Sharing functionality in iOS 9. It is likely that Home Sharing was removed in iOS 8.4 due to changes necessary with the record labels to launch the new streaming music service. Cook previously revealed details on this week’s iOS 9 beta, streaming bit rates, and more via Twitter.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Many have praised Apple Music’s launch this week, although the focus has largely been on the free component of the service, a 24/7 streaming radio station called Beats 1. But how are users reacting to the rest of the Apple Music service? It received a lot of positive reviews in the media, but users have noticed some user experience issues and technical hiccups with Apple Music that might keep them from making a switch from the competition when the service’s free three month trial is up. Since the issues aren’t getting a lot of attention from the main stream media, I wanted to share everything we hate about Apple Music so far and what Apple needs to fix before converting potential switchers:
Expand
Expanding
Close

I’m not expecting here to replicate my rather extensive Apple Watch diary series – I doubt this one will run to four pieces. I’m also not starting out here as an Apple Music skeptic. I’ve been using Spotify for years, and – from a brief trial of Beats Music – started out pretty confident I would be jumping ship once Apple Music launched.

But I do think Apple Music has one thing in common with the Watch: I don’t think it’s possible to judge it without a reasonable amount of usage. So I thought I’d begin with my first impressions and then follow up once I’ve used it long enough to have more to say.

I’m not going to dwell on the launch-day glitches, like the welcome screen (above) left over from the beta, the rather belated iTunes update, Beats 1 outage, frequent spinning beachballs in iTunes and the tracks that either refused to play at all or took an age to do so. Half the planet was simultaneously using the service yesterday, so these things will only become issues if they persist. So leaving those aside, what were my first impressions … ? 
Expand
Expanding
Close