Apple Music storms into battle for streaming tunes fans.
“It’s hard to believe that the App Store was launched only seven years ago,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said on stage, with audible glee. “I’m happy to announce that the App Store recently passed a major milestone: The app store has passed 100 billion apps downloaded.” To put that in context: That means about 25 billion apps have been downloaded over the last 12 months.
Apple is making it easier for students and other casual developers to try their hand at building apps for its products, by allowing them to test an app on their personal devices for free.Apple Inc. on Monday announced a new app for reading news which will combine articles from more than 50 publications into one customizable stream, furthering a shift in how publishers distribute their content on digital platforms.In a much anticipated announcement Monday, new Apple employee Jimmy Iovine told attendees at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference here that the new Apple Music app will mesh elements of existing on-demand services with a decidedly retro feature. The Apple News app, which is expected to launch in the fall, will come preloaded on the company’s new operating system iOS 9, meaning it could potentially give publishers access to hundreds of millions of readers around the world. “We see great potential in this partnership to reach very, very large audience groups,” said Mark Thompson, president of the New York Times Co., which is one of nearly 20 publishers to sign on with Apple for the launch of the app. “We believe this is a great way to get people who are less engaged with our brand to become more so.” Beyond the New York Times, the first group of partners includes The Economist, the Daily Mail, BuzzFeed, ESPN and several titles from Vox Media, Conde Nast, Hearst and Time Inc.
Apple Music takes the human-curation element of Beats Music, the subscription service Apple got in its $3 billion Beats Electronics purchase last year, and adds Beats1, a live DJ-helmed radio station aimed at giving music a cultural center that has been diluted since the digital revolution rocked the music industry landscape. As part of the announcement, Apple also revealed that it has paid out more than $30 billion to developers who design apps— a key figure as the company competes with platforms like Android to lure developers and offer the most enticing selection of applications. Now, anyone with an Apple ID will be able to download the company’s Xcode development environment and use it to build an iOS app and test it on a device they own. Apple is coming from behind and late to the streaming scene, which is a typical approach for the company that was late to digital music players and smartphones but managed to crush both categories with the iPod and iPhone.
To celebrate the 100 billion milestone, Apple showed off a seemingly endless video featuring big names like Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and film director J.J. The Apple initiative comes on the heels of Facebook’s launch last month of a news partnership called Instant Articles in which publishers ranging from NBC News to National Geographic post their stories directly onto Facebook’s newsfeed, rather than linking readers back to their own sites.
In addition, the OS X and iOS Developer Programs have merged into one Apple Developer Program, so app makers now have to pay only a single $99 fee to make and distribute apps for iOS, OS X and WatchOS. Earlier this year, the messaging app Snapchat launched Snapchat Discover, which allows publishers to create special content designed to appeal to the platform’s mostly younger users. Here’s a look at three key changes Apple announced Monday at its developers’ conference in San Francisco and what glitches Apple undoubtedly will be trying to avoid when the public gets to use them. Such efforts have sparked debate in the media world about whether the power of individual publisher-branded websites and apps is beginning to fade as digital outlets become stronger avenues to distribute content, especially to young Web users that do their reading on smartphones. The question is simply whether what Apple is proposing with its revamped Music product is different enough from what’s out there to get consumers’ attention and payments.
The new service will run $10 a month, or $15 a month for a family of six users. (An Android version is coming soon.) Besides its radio station featuring London deejay Zane Lowe, other features of Apple Music include For You (curated suggestions based on your listening habits) and Connect (a forum for musicians to reach out to fans with new songs and other media). “Today, there are too many places people have to go to experience music, and that’s the problem we wanted to solve,” iTunes chief Eddy Cue told USA TODAY. Multitask on the iPad (or at least the iPad Air 2): The ability to run apps side-by-side on an iPad is seen by analysts and Apple watchers as a precursor to the unveiling of a bigger iPad, which would be squarely aimed at converting more people from laptops to tablets.
Apple’s announcement comes at a time when Microsoft, Google and other platform operators are trying to cast as wide a net as possible in order to bring on new developers. The Apple app is similar to one offered by Flipboard, which lets readers create their own customized news feeds, choosing among a variety of publications and broad news categories.
Apple said the arrangement will allow publishers to keep 100% of the revenue from ads they sell themselves and 70% of ad revenue generated by Apple’s iAd platform. But after growing the store to mammoth proportions – today Apple claims some 80% of global download sales – the company has been faced with a consumer shift away from buying music (song sales are down 12% over last year) and towards streaming (up 54% in 2014, according to Nielsen SoundScan). Those terms are similar to the deals Facebook is offering. “It’s going to give us an opportunity to reach people with our content, including younger readers,” said Scott McAllister, Time Inc.’s senior vice president of digital marketing and revenue. “Maybe some will fall in love with People magazine, and create a relationship with People.com or the People app.
For Cue, Apple Music isn’t a new venture, but the realization of 15 years of conversations that began when he and Steve Jobs invited record producer Iovine – who went on to found Beats Electronics with rapper Dr. Furthermore, the Windows Universal App Platform in Windows 10 will make it possible for developers to create one core program that runs across devices, and then craft user interface code for different form factors Requiring developers to sign up and pay for different development programs made Apple an outlier, and this change makes its development tools more competitive with other companies in the same market.
He calls himself a “fanboy who can’t believe he’s working here.” The three sketch out a new service that has its roots in the desire to simplify the streaming experience for both consumers and musicians, whose options today include Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud, YouTube and the new Jay Z-backed service, Tidal. “If you love music, there are just a ton of places and apps, whether that’s streaming, radio, social, music videos, but it’s messy,” says Cue. “It’s hard for the consumer, and they miss out on things.” “In my opinion, we have failed if we don’t change music (with Apple Music). We’re like (’60s British pirate radio station) Radio Caroline, we’re offshore and pushing out content,” he says. “We serve no master but music.” Reznor laments how the “act of listening to music has been demoted, and we can help elevate it again to being treated like art. But whether a News icon showing up on iPhone screens is enough to pull people away from reading and watching news on Snapchat or Facebook won’t be known for a few months.