Apple unveiled Apple Music (which will launch on June 30); their new streaming music service that also includes a live radio station that is broadcast 24-hours from three different cities (Los Angeles, New York, and London). The service also includes a social networking platform that artists are able to use to share any content they wish and also to connect with their fans through social media (it acts as a command center of sorts where everything is managed on Apple Music Connect, and can then be shared to sites like Twitter and Facebook, via e-mail/iMessage).
Apple’s new Apple Music site provides more details about the service including what features are free for everyone, and what will require a subscription. The service will launch with a 3-month free trial.
I’ve already seen re-tweets from region specific Apple Music accounts (like Apple Music Japan and Apple Music ES). And this leads me to the main part of my posting.
Media tends to be very region specific due to the business end of things (licensing restrictions), and cracking that nut isn’t an easy one since some countries have a very different business model with how their industries operate. Thus for folks like myself who tend to have a much larger library of imported non-western music and other related media (primarily Japanese and Korean), region specific services like this will rarely meet my needs (granted, folks like myself are in a relatively small niche).
That is of course unless I setup a JP specific Apple ID (but that creates other issues when considering my main Apple ID which is tied to the US) so that I can use Apple Music Japan (I highly doubt there will be much crossover with Apple Music due to the before mentioned licensing restrictions as well as language differences). Very few Japanese artists have a world wide license for their music including a very limited world wide presence on iTunes (and when they do make their music available outside the country, they usually sign a deal with a label in that specific country).
Thus come June 30th when I try out Apple Music, I know that my library isn’t going to get much useful human curated results. I am going to use the OS X 10.11 El Capitan beta to pare my music library down on that test system to only my Japanese music (I am curious to see what happens).
As for Apple Music Connect, it seems like Ping 2 (Ping was iTunes social networking service for music that didn’t go anywhere, and was later shutdown – Apple integrated Facebook and Twitter into iTunes to replace Ping). They seem to be taking another stab at this but this time around, instead of trying to create a music specific social networking platform, they also included Facebook and Twitter (and likely region specific SNS) integration into the platform (with Connect acting as a central hub for artists to easily post whatever content they wish, and allow them the ability to share that easily to multiple services).
I’ve noted before that web services (that by extension includes social networking) aren’t Apple’s forte and doing it this way is better for everyone. Apple Music is of course entering a market that is dominated by the likes of Pandora and Spotify. One of Apple Music’s key selling points is human curated recommendations; it remains to be seen though exactly how much of an important differentiator that will be when it comes to the playlist and music listening experience. Bottomline, I’m really not sure how much a game changer this is going to be at this time.
