Ending weeks of speculation, Apple on Thursday at last gave us a number: Apple Music has signed up eleven million people for its three-month free trial, one month after the new music service debuted. The number was officially revealed by Eddy Cue, Apple's Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services in a statement to USA Today, who said "We're thrilled with the numbers so far."
Beats 1 is a great, but what if you're not available to listen to your favorite DJ's show at the time it initially airs? Good news: Beats 1 nowallows users to replay entire shows.
Since Beat 1's inception, it's always been possible to replay a DJ's playlist, but being able to replay an entire show, complete with commentary, wasn't possible. Thanks to the recent change, this is no longer the case.
Users can now easily replay a show from their favorite DJ just by following a few steps. Admittedly, the steps aren't as straightforward as one might expect from a company that prides itself on dead-simple usage, but it seems to be a running theme with iTunes and the Music app to make things more muddled than need be.
Beats 1 may not be the only live radio station on Apple Music for long, reports The Verge. Citing sources with knowledge of the agreement, the outlet says that Apple's current music licensing contracts include permissions for up to five additional Beats radio stations.
"As part of the deal it struck with the major labels for Apple Music Radio," says The Verge's Micah Singleton, "Apple has licenses for up to five additional stations like Beats 1." So it could essentially create a lineup of 6 radio stations without needing to renegotiate.
Dr. Dre's highly anticipated Compton will premiere on Apple Music this week, says Zane Lowe. The popular DJ and Beats 1 Radio host announced on Twitter this afternoon that the album will stream uncensored and exclusively this Thursday from 6pm to 9pm PDT.
This will be Dre's first new album in more than 15 years, succeeding Chronic 2001, which went sextuple platinum. He announced the record on his Beats 1 show "The Pharmacy" late last week, saying that the music was inspired by the new movie Straight Outta Compton.
Apple on Wednesday launched an official AppleMusic Snapchat account. The company is promoting the venture on Instagram and other social networks, indicating that its first story offers an exclusive look at Beats 1 Radio.
You can find the story on Snapchat under the user name AppleMusic. The video is just over 200 seconds long, and it takes you on a quick tour of the three studios in Los Angeles, New York and London that keep Beats 1 going.
Apple Music has been available for a little more than a month now and the service already has dozens, if not hundreds of problems to complain about which have earned it mixed reviews from the press.
Apple Music's biggest advantage, its tight integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, is being erased for some amid a flurry of issues, ranging from disappearing music, issues with DRM, user interface inconsistencies and poor implementation in iTunes, to mention just a few.
You've heard the horror stories and have hopefully played long enough with Apple Music in order to make an informed decision as to whether or not you'll continue using it once the free three-month trial expires.
Now that you've tried Apple Music thanks to Apple's generous three-month free trial, you may have decided that the service just isn't cut for you.
Though impossible to get rid of it completely, you can temporarily hide most of Apple Music's aspects.
Our previous tutorial has taught you how to disconnect from Apple Music's Connect feature and today's how-to lays out the steps to hide Apple Music on your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Mac and go back to the old way of enjoying music.
T-Mobile has added Apple Music to the list of supported streaming services for Music Freedom, an initiative which allows subscribers to stream their favorite songs through services like Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and more, over T-Mobile's cellular network and without burning their 4G LTE data.
Hailed as T-Mobile's “last Un-Carrier Amped move of the summer,” Simple Choice customers can now enjoy Apple's streaming music service without worrying about Apple Music cellular data usage counting against their monthly 4G LTE allowance.
A new report Tuesday by Hits Daily Double alleges that Apple's new streaming-music services has signed up more than ten million customers in its first four weeks. Citing “inside sources at some of the major labels,” the streaming statistics was reportedly shared with content owners by Apple itself.
Apple Music is free during its first three months, after which iTunes will charge customers' credit card on file $9.99 per month to continue using the service, or $14.99 for a family of six.
Apple Music is great, but with all of the new music discovery it brings, you're bound to run into situations where you wish you had quick access to song lyrics. That's where a brand new jailbreak tweak called LyricForMusic comes into play.
LyricForMusic lends you nearly instant access to a song's lyrics simply by tapping on its album artwork. And this works, not only for the music that you own or for the music that you have saved locally to your device; it also works for music streamed directly from Apple Music's 30+ million song catalog.
There will be no transferring your offline Apple Music collections onto the new iPod nano or iPod shuffle because Apple is overly concerned about piracy, as it should be, and so the company's decided to play it safe instead.
As 9to5Mac discovered Friday, attempting to transfer Apple Music songs marked for offline playback onto your nano or shuffle via iTunes produces a “some of the items in the iTunes library were not copied to the iPod because Apple Music songs cannot be copied to an iPod” message.
Of course, you can still sync your own songs that you imported into iTunes and music purchased on the iTunes Store, just like before, but Apple Music including songs marked for offline playback is off limits to the nano and shuffle.
Apple today released iTunes 12.2.1 which solves a few issue, among them an annoying bug that's been driving more than a few early adopters of Apple Music crazy.
For context, Apple's standalone $25 per year iTunes Match subscription is commonly used to legitimately replace matched songs in your library with DRM-free files from iTunes in the high-quality 256Kbps AAC format. Unfortunately, iTunes Match as part of Apple Music membership contains a flaw.
Even though Apple Music checks songs in your own library against its vast catalog, matched tracks get incorrectly labeled as Apple Music and wrapped inside FairPlay, Apple's proprietary DRM system. As a result, you're prevented from enjoying your own Matched music on non-Apple devices.
More importantly, Apple Music members who cancel their subscription may end up with DRM-protected matched tracks. Making matter worse, deleting a track in your Mac's original library for the purpose of re-downloading it as a 256Kbps AAC file will prompt Apple Music to incorrectly replace the original, non-DRM version with a DRM-laden file.
This was never intended behavior: a flaw causes iTunes to incorrectly label songs from Matched to Apple Music. But worry not, iTunes 12.2.1 comes to the rescue: release notes state that the update resolves an issue “where iTunes incorrectly changed some songs from Matched to Apple Music”.
Here're the steps you must take if your matched songs show up as DRM-protected Apple Music tracks.