“When Apple unveils a new music streaming service at the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, it will largely leave behind its 15-year-old iTunes brand,” Tim Bradshaw and Matthew Garrahan report for The Financial Times. “The company’s competitor to streaming pioneers such as Spotify and Pandora, the radio service, will simply be called Apple Music.”
“Apple Music is expected to come preinstalled when iPhone owners upgrade to the latest operating system,” Bradshaw and Garrahan report. “Unlike Spotify, the new Apple streaming service will not have a free tier. Mr Iovine, the music industry veteran and former Beats chief executive who is running Apple Music, is a vocal opponent of free music. But Apple will offer users three months’ free use when they sign up.”
MacDailyNews Note: Apple Music will reportedly offer unlimited listening and artist-curated internet radio for $9.99 per month.
Bradshaw and Garrahan report, “One digital-music insider estimates that Apple would need to win more than twice as many subscribers as Spotify has accrued in the last seven years to generate the same revenue that iTunes downloads make today.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Of course, Apple would like to make money, but this is negligible money to Apple. The value comes from making the high-margin hardware even more difficult to resist. Apple has enough money to run the service at a loss for hundreds of years. Yes, hundreds. Worldwide, assuming it rolls out beyond the U.S. immediately or rather soon, if Apple Music can’t garner just 30 million subscribers at $9.99/mo. each, something is drastically wrong.
A free trial period of three months sounds perfect, especially as it’s soon to be the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere where the usual suspects for initial rollout reside (U.S., Canada, Europe, China, Japan) and the season where music is played outdoors at parties and on the beach; places where many people can hear Apple Music and the new deejay-powered iTunes Radio for the first time.
As for “iTunes,” the application, and “iTunes Store,” the online storefront, the brand has long been a misnomer. If anything, it should be called “iMedia” and “iMedia Store” or something. Music, movies, TV shows, books, textbooks, podcasts, audiobooks, radio, apps… sheesh! Both have become a monstrosity. The iTunes brand has served its purpose.
SEE ALSO:
All-new Apple Music subscription service, rebuilt iTunes Radio to arrive with iOS 8.4 in late June – June 5, 2015
