It’s “for people with no idea what to stream,” and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
First of all, what is it?
Apple Music is the tech giant’s significant upgrade on iTunes, and a direct rival to Spotify, Tidal and other music services.
For a quick video tutorial, this is great from USA Today’s Ed Baig.
Yahoo Tech:
It seems Apple has forgotten how to say “No.”
In its simplest form, Apple Music is an updated app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch; in the fall, it will be available for Android (Apple’s first Android app ever). Spend enough time in this app, though, and you’ll find out that Apple Music is a confusing stew of components:
- A new, $10-a-month streaming-music service, like Spotify, Tidal, Rdio, Google Music, Deezer, Rhapsody, and others
- Free customized “radio stations,” based on bands or songs you like, much like Pandora
- An Internet radio station, BeatsOne (which is not customized to your tastes)
- A “channel” of promotional extras from certain bands
- Apple Match (upload the song files you own for streaming to all your Apple machines)
- iTunes — or, in other words, your existing collection of music downloads
The good news is that all of this works flawlessly on day one. And with 800 million iTunes account holders in its pocket, Apple has a good chance of making this service a success.
But whatever gifts Apple brings to the table by entering the subscription-music game, simplicity isn’t among them.
Forbes
Apple Music isn’t quite the revolutionary knock-out blow many predicted, but it’s a compelling start and, with Apple’s marketing potential behind it, could well become the most high profile streaming music service around.
What would Wow Us? Apple giving Apple Music subscriptions free for two years with the purchase of a new iPhone or iPad (and probably one year with an iPod touch). Google and Spotify simply don’t have the hardware backbone in their business models to compete with that.
Business, Etc
It’s expected to be around 30 million tracks. That’s roughly the same as Spotify and Google Play Music so any music you’ll find there, you’ll find here and vice versa.
You will be able to upload up to 25,000 of your own songs on the service and it’s planning to increase that number to 100,000 tracks by the time iOS 9 arrives (usually at the end of September).
Recode.net
Apple has built a handsome, robust app and service that goes well beyond just offering a huge catalog of music by providing many ways to discover and group music for a very wide range of tastes and moods.
But it’s also uncharacteristically complicated by Apple standards, with everything from a global terrestrial radio station to numerous suggested playlists for different purposes in different places. And the company offers very little guidance on how to navigate its many features.
It will take time to learn it. And that’s not something you’re going to want to do if all you’re looking for is to lean back and listen.
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