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.
If you interact with a rich ad on Pandora for at least fifteen seconds, the Internet radio service will reward you with an hour of uninterrupted listening free of advertising, the company announced in a blog post Monday.
They're calling it Sponsored Listening and it's available now to all advertisers, meaning this feature will be available on a per-ad basis.
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.
Lots of ink was used in the run-up to Apple Music introduction regarding exclusive music deals that Apple has managed to negotiate with its favorite artists. And in addition to album exclusives, Apple's Beats 1 global radio is hosted by celebrity DJs and has already aired a few exclusive interviews.
And now, the 24/7 live-streaming radio station has partnered with Viacom-owned MTV to exclusively reveal nominees for the upcoming Video Music Awards (VMA), a move which suggests Apple's desire to position Beats 1 as the de facto source of both new music and industry events.
Following Apple Music introduction, Spotify has doubled down on music discovery and third-party integration, the two areas where it hopes to outsmart competition, with Monday's announcement of a Discover Weekly feature and deep integration with the Nike+ Running mobile app.
Unlike Apple's human-curated playlists for various activity types, Spotify's Discover Weekly playlists are entirely driven by algorithms and personalized to each user's listening habits, as per Re/code on Monday.
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.
It's no secret Apple Music has some way to go before achieving feature parity between iOS and OS X.
Some crucial aspects of Apple Music on iOS have yet to make their way into iTunes for Mac and Windows PCs, and now Apple's $9.99 per month service was discovered to have been avoiding adding streamed songs to a Recently Played playlist.
As Kirk McElhearn noted, it's a huge, unexpected oversight on Apple's part because you should in fact be permitted to access a full history of what you have listened to, regardless of whether it's locally stored music or Apple Music files streamed to your computer or mobile device.
An Apple job listing seeking a seasoned Los Angeles, California-based Original Content Video Producer was discovered Monday, our best indication yet that the company is now creating original video content for both Apple Music and iTunes.
A proven track record in producing branded video content and content series for social platforms is required and the ideal candidate will work from Apple-owned Culver City campus, which belonged to Beats before the company was acquired last year by Apple for $3 billion.
Pitchfork recently said that Apple has actually been making music videos for select artists in-house.
Apple on Monday issued a bug-fix update to iTunes for Mac and Windows. iTunes 12.2.1, available through the Software Update mechanism or standalone via iTunes.com/download, fixes a pair of issues with iTunes Match, Apple's $25 per year song identification service. In addition, it contains minor bug fixes and improvements for Beats 1, Apple's free of charge 24/7 global Internet radio broadcasting in more than a hundred countries.
If you choose to hide Apple Music on an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, the Music app gains a new Connect tab.
Described by Apple as a place where “musicians give their fans a closer look at their work, their inspirations, and their world,”Apple Music Connect permits music lovers to view and follow an artist's stream, like and comment on their posts and more.
Apple Music Connect is basically Ping 2.0. The feature is a tad crude in appearance and feels rough around the edges so little wonder that some folks don't view Connect as valuable enough for it to deserve its own tab.
Wouldn't it be great if you could get rid of the Connect tab? Thankfully, there is.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that the Connect feature couldn't be disabled: Apple has made sure to burry and hide it in an obscure place. In this post, I'm going to explain precisely how you can disconnect from Connect in Apple Music on iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or Mac.
SoundCloud updated its iOS client this morning, bringing the app to version 3.10.1. The company says the update "significantly upgrades the listening experience," bringing about more functionality for playlists, the ability to shuffle your Likes, and a new 'related tracks' feature.
With the new playlist capabilities, you can now shuffle and edit your playlist within the mobile app. When SoundCloud redesigned its iPhone app last summer, it removed these and several other features, and it has since been re-adding them through a series of iterative updates.