Apple Music Today is Apple’s new music series, an audio documentary of sorts that highlights one popular song every day and digs into the story behind it.
- What’s happening? As it celebrates 100 million songs, Apple has launched the new Apple Music Today series which dives into the history of popular songs. Every day a new song is featured.
- Why care? Apple Music has the most extensive catalog of all music-streaming services. Apple previously produced a few music-focused documentaries and if you liked those, you’re going to love the new Apple Music Today series.
- What to do? Browse Apple Music and visit the new Apple Music Today section where you’ll find the first entry in the series about Sinéad O’Connor.
Apple Music Today: How popular songs came to be
Here’s Apple’s description of the show:
Apple Music Today is our new daily series that highlights one song from our catalog of over 100 million and digs into the story behind it. From massive hits to creeper cuts to the news surprise drop, our Apple Music hosts dive in across genres and decades to unpack untold stories about the much that soundtracks our lives, 365 days later.
Visit the new Apple Music Today section today at this link.
100 million songs on Apple Music
Today, there are 100 million songs on Apple Music.
Twenty-one years on from the invention of iTunes and the debut of the original iPod, we’ve gone from 1,000 songs in your pocket to 100,000x that on Apple Music. It’s phenomenal growth by any metric. The entire history, present, and future of music is at your fingertips or voice command.
More music than you can listen to in a lifetime, or several lifetimes. More music than any other platform. Simply the biggest collection of music, in any format, ever.
One hundred million songs—it’s a number that will continue to grow and exponentially multiply. But it’s more than just a number, representing something much more significant—the tectonic shift in the business of music making and distribution over these past two decades.
To celebrate the occasion, Apple published a press release in the Apple Newsroom that shares interesting stats about music in general.
For instance, did you know that in the 1960s only 5,000 new albums were released yearly? But fast forward to 2022 and you’ll be surprised to learn that there are 20,000 singers and songwriters uploading new songs to Apple Music each and every day. Read: How to transfer liked songs and playlists from Spotify to Apple Music
Nothing compares 2 Sinéad O’Connor
The first entry in the Apple Music Today series is about the Irish singer and songwriter Sinéad O’Connor, 55 years old, whose first two albums released in the 1980s charted internationally and received glowing reviews. The episode is about “the rise, fall and rise again of a ’90s pop superstar,” according to the description.
In 2017, the singer changed her name to Magda Davitt. A year later she changed it again to Shuhada’ Sadaqat after converting to Islam.
The episode also covers O’Connor’s Saturday Night Live appearance in 1992 when she tore the photo of Pope John Paul II and threw the pieces around to protest against the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church. The episode is aptly titled “Nothing compares 2 Sinéad O’Connor taking a stand on SNL”