“Apple has been beefing up its music analytics in the run-up to the expected launch of its music service,” Lisa Fleisher reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Apple recently purchased London-based Semetric, which produces an analytics service that tracks music sales, illegal downloads and social-networking mentions, a person familiar with the acquisition said. Terms of the deal weren’t available,” Fleisher reports. “An Apple attorney joined Semetric’s board in October, British music blog Music Ally reported Wednesday, citing public filings.”
“Semetric’s Musicmetric service has worked with services such as Spotify to provide analytics to help artists track their content,” Fleisher reports. “‘Artists don’t really know how much they’re getting listened to, who is listening,’ said Mark Mulligan, research director at U.K.-based MIdia Research, a media and tech analysis company. That type of analysis could help Apple’s streaming service position itself as artist-friendly, he said. ”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Apple soon to pre-install iTunes Music – formerly Beats Music – subscription service in iOS update – November 19, 2014
Taylor Swift pulls all of her albums from Spotify – November 3, 2014
So sick of hearing about the music misadventures of Apple. How about Apple delivers a robust industrial strength future forward new file system to replace the 30 year old HFS+, or Apple delivers most bug free release of OS X / OS X Server yet! Maybe Apple buys Dropbox? Or Apple beefs up Pages and Numbers to seriously compete with Office? Or Apple acquires WiFi Technology braintrust firm to address ongoing WiFi issues in their products that they just can’t seem to get rid of. Maybe Apple introduces centralized security management system to assist naive users. Apple provides web management for Airports.
I have all the music I need. I need Apple to get back to IT fundamentals. As I watch my beautiful new iMac 5k crash whenever it wakes up from sleep (known problem), and I look at 3 billion dollars going to Beats, I just kinda wonder if the priority meter might be half a bubble or so off center.
What’s wrong with HFS+, and what do you need out of a file system that isn’t already provided? If you want advanced file system features, there will be a cost for for those. nothing is free..
Apple’s HFS+ file system is okay, but it’s dated and is overdue to catch up to features that other file systems – including NTFS, used on Windows machines, offers. For example: error correction. Or one step better would be BTRFS, used on many Linux OSes, which allows new capabilities like transparent compression & encryption, data deduplication, and data pooling. A lot of this was pioneered with ZFS, and Apple was expected to implement ZFS back on OS X 10.5, but for some unknown reason Apple got cold feet and hasn’t fundamentally improved itself. The only thing stopping Apple to have a superior file system to Windows is Apple’s fear of complexity.
In this era where cyber security is a constant concern, Apple should lead instead of follow.