“There’s a new version of iOS. Yes really. iOS 8.4 comes just five days after the company launched iOS 8.3 (which fixed one big issue but caused another) and the first beta hits developers with something very interesting: a revamped music service,” Gordon Kelly writes for Forbes.
“Unfortunately at this stage it isn’t that music service, but there is still plenty of time for Apple to bake in a Beats Music-based streaming product,” Kelly writes. “In fact such a service is likely to get its own event prior to launch so this is Apple just getting the foundations right.”
“So what is the Music service in question?” Kelly writes. “It’s an overhaul of the core ‘Music’ app from top to bottom”
Full article, with Apple’s iOS 8.4 beta change log, here.
MacDailyNews Take: For Apple and music, somethings big this way come.
MDN take… something big this way comes?
Right… A paraphrase on Ray (Bradbury)
Would be an awesome event slogan.
Actually Bradbury lifted the line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes”
Maybe somethings like multiple apps for the Mac to break up the iTunes kludge? Music, Video, Podcasts, etc. as needed? Not sure how that’d work on Windows PCs, or if iTunes would remain on Windows…
I don’t understand the “iTunes sludge” complaint. Why should I want more than one app to deal with music?
The question is, why would you want to attempt to manage music, movies, audiobooks, and other media in one kludged flat, slow, bloated mess of an application that looks like Ive sat his pet elephant on it?
YES!!!!! Been waiting 3 years for Apple to fix its iTunes mess. One program to manage music and videos was a bad idea from the start. Putting links to the music store for stuff I already bought is just stupid. And adding music rental on top of it all is another step too far. No other program spins a beach ball more than iTunes.
Break it all apart, and fix syncing so that it JUST WORKS.
Maybe they’re finally fixing how iTunes Match works? I can hope!!
Please Apple, get rid of cover flow. It is an absolute waste on a 6+. In landscape mode, music.app should have a playlist ToC on the left and a list of songs in the selected playlist on the right, similar to iTunes on a Mac.
Do not plan on renting music and there are many more that share the view.
Subscription music was something Microsoft was doing while Apple was ringing up billions in digital music downloads. Subscription is just rent seeking behavior masquerading as choice.
Music worth listening to is worth buying. Of course feel free to subscribe to Hip-Hop and Rap as it is not worth buying or listening to. I am pretty sure nobody will be listening to 3-6 Mafia 50 years from now…
Steve Jobs:
“People want to own their music”
“‘Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,’
‘The subscription model has failed so far.’
MDN’s take back then (april 2007 archives): ” Business models that fly in the face of human nature are doomed to failure.”
“Human beings like to listen to favorite songs over and over. They like to own these songs, so that they can play them over and over. They do not want to pay someone an unending monthly rate in order to be allowed to hear their favorite songs.”
What Jobs and MDN said then made sense then it makes sense now though Apple is big and open enough to give the subscription music business a try but it’s not the base model, subscription is not what made iTunes fantastic.
What I find ironic is that MDN’s take back then, a very rational one that seems to be changing now that Apple is looking into subscription based music.
That being said, the analogies to rented music, streaming music, music radio, curating and does have some very nice features, to be introduced to music, to learn more about musicians, the history of music, the genres or themes within music of just plain fun.
The best radio experiences I can recall off the top of my head involved, an excellent deejay, or an in depth news show, or a good radio play. You had to select and find the good stuff through a trash of crappy stations, adds, and all playing the top 40. Radio was just part of it though, the really good stuff, the eclectic music with depth you found very rarely on the radio. Radio is grand for the masses, but for individualistic tastes, it’s not been for me, at least.
What do you or others feel?
Your post is spot on with my sentiments but I do like to keep an open mind and I have been thinking on what circumstances would I listen to radio, or pay for a subscription service.
If I was forced to use a subscription model for hearing music, I’d immediately rip the tunes OUT of the service onto my hard drive so I get to KEEP them. There are piles of apps for ripping tunes these days, not matter the source.
IOW: I’d immediately be breaking the service license.
Therefore, being a music fanatic, I’d rather just BUY my tunes in order to make sure the musicians are getting their due royalties.
As for Internet ‘radio’ services, which are entirely different: THEM I like and never rip tunes from them. Their purpose is for me to hear something new, different, more interesting than the corporate crap. They’ll always have my interest and I hope they always hand off fair royalties to musicians.
[Note that the Music Oligarchy is infamous for trying to utterly destroy Internet radio with vastly jacked up royalty fees. To hell with that ploy! Keep it all fair and reasonable or expect customer retribution, dear selfish and self-destructive Music Oligarchy. 😛 )
Correction, sigh: “…these days, NO matter the source.” – – And yes, that last character should be: ]
There is a world of difference between old-school download subscription services, and modern streaming subscription services. People do not want to download files onto their computer or phone if they have to pay a monthly fee for the right to play them. But a streaming service? Well, that’s like a musical equivalent to Netflix. Why would anyone have a problem with that?
——RM
It seems weird to introduce such a major overhaul to a core app in the middle of a version, rather than wait for iOS9.
I don’t suppose the overhaul will bring back the classic iPod artist -> album -> song navigation? I’m an old-fashioned music listener who likes to listen to music one album at a time. The current Music app presents all songs from a given artist at once, grouped by album, but with the albums in chronological order, rather than alphabetical.
(At least I think it’s chronological. Truth be told, I’ve never figured out what order they’re supposed to be in.)
So if I want to listen to, say, one particular Barenaked Ladies album, it involves a lot of scrolling to find the album. And I have remember where the album ends so I can manually stop playback.
The fact that I hear almost no complaints about this makes me figure that I’m a dinosaur, and that most modern listeners prefer to scramble up all the tracks by a given artist. Whatever. I downloaded the alternative music player Cesium which restores the classic intuitive iPod navigation.
——RM
Hey Apple, how about intelligent iTunes searching? Why can’t the user search with all the boolean logic, case sensitive, language sensitive, in specific metadata fields of his choosing? How about showing all the metadata for a track in one Info window instead of the hidden multi-tab garbage you introduced in iTunes 12?