Billboard yesterday published a wide-ranging interview with Apple executive and music industry mogul Jimmy Iovine, who dropped hints of Apple Music's “hybrid” future. He also discussed the difference between the engineer culture in Silicon Valley and the creative culture in Hollywood and underscored the importance of technology in popular culture and other tidbits. Here are some choice quotes from that interview.
Amazon today announced its long-rumored music streaming service to better compete with the likes of Apple Music, Spotify, Google Play Music, Tidal and others. The service is called Amazon Music Unlimited and starts at $9.99 per month for individual accounts or $14.99 per month for a family of six, which is the standard pricing offered by Apple Music and others.
However, Amazon has undercut Apple Music with a $7.99 per month tier for members of its $99 per year Prime service. And if you want to only stream music to your Echo wireless speaker, Amazon Music Unlimited is just $3.99 per month.
Unofficial remixes of songs are launching on both Apple Music and Spotify thanks to a partnership with a company called Dubset Media Holdings. Apple signed a deal with Dubset in March 2016, while Spotify cut a similar deal of its own in May.
Remixes and DJ mix sets, typically distributed through services like YouTube and SoundCloud, should start appearing on Apple Music and Spotify.
Dubset's proprietary scan-and-match technology will ensure that artists get paid fairly for musical remixes, TechCrunch said Friday.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman is reporting today that Apple is in the process of unifying its separate cloud services team in an effort to foster tighter collaboration between them, better compete with Google and Amazon in the cloud space and improve Siri, Maps, iTunes, iCloud and other services.
Eddy Cue, Apple's boss of Internet Software and Services, will oversee the effort to move cloud service engineering teams to a single campus as Apple continues shifting its cloud to its own infrastructure.
Those of you who use Spotify to stream their favorite music online are probably accustomed to the app’s dark interface, but if you think you might enjoy a lighter app makeover, then you may like a new free jailbreak tweak called Lightify.
While Apple likes to put emphasis on the human curation that goes behind the scenes, Apple Music is still largely powered by algorithms that learn about your music tastes by looking at your own library, but also by looking at your recent activity, including the songs you Love.
The more you play a song, the more the algorithm understands you like that song, and maybe by extension that band. If you Love a song, you're also signaling that this is a tune you particularly enjoy. Algorithms then crunch data based on your behavior to improve music suggestions for you.
For the past year, my favorite way to train Apple Music's algorithms was to actively Love songs. It was a quick and simple way for me to tell Apple "hey, I really like that, please play this more often and also play more songs similar to that one."
But the big, bold, confusing mess of a redesign that happened with iOS 10 has changed a lot of things, including how you now Love songs on Apple Music.
Apple Music ranks highest among customers in the just-released 2016 J.D. Power Streaming Music Satisfaction Study. The high profile marketing research firm says the 1-year old streaming service beat out veterans like Pandora and Spotify in 3 of the 6 measures in its study, and first overall.
Spotify, the #1 music streaming service, today announced a new playlist updated daily with tracks that users mark as favorites as well as new music.
Now available in the updated mobile Spotify app for iOS and Android, Daily Mix differs from Spotify's existing Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists which get refreshed each Monday and Friday, respectively, in that Daily Mix won't be a complete refresh of songs each time the playlist is updated.
Apple Music executives Jimmy Iovine, Bozoma Saint John and DJ Zane Lowe recently sat down with BuzzFeed's Reggie Ugwu for a rather interesting interview regarding the streaming music service. The conversation covers everything from the controversy surrounding Apple's push for artist exclusives to their plans for the future, and we've listed our favorite experts below.
Current (or potential future) Apple Music users are going to want to check out this deal from PayPal. The e-payment company is offering a gift card good for a 1-year subscription to Apple's streaming music service for just $99.
Since an individual subscription to Apple Music is typically $9.99/month, this makes for a ~$20 discount—or 2 free months of service. The gift card can be purchased via PayPal's eBay store and is delivered within minutes by email.
Apple on Sunday night aired a new Apple Music ad during the 2016 Emmy Awards starring "Late Late Show" host James Corden. The spot is called "The all-new Apple Music," and it highlights the content and discovery features of the company's streaming service.
In the humorous clip, Corden pitches Apple Music commercial ideas to executives Jimmy Iovine, Eddy Cue and Bozoma Saint John. As you can imagine, most of Corden's concepts are off-the-wall, and in the end the team decides the collaboration isn't going to work.
Spotify users who add music to their playlists will understand the struggle a new free jailbreak tweak called Tweakify aims to fix.
Rather than adding new songs to the bottom of your song playlists, this tweak adds them to the top so they're easier to find while still preserving the ability to move and re-order your tracks on your own afterwards.