“Just days from its launch, Apple Music has upped the ante with a very large and expensive poker chip,” Hugh McIntyre reports for Forbes. “The company has reportedly partnered with superstar producer and singer-songwriter Pharrell Williams to release his latest single, ‘Freedom.'”
“Bringing a megastar like Pharrell on board is a good idea, even if it only helps minimally in the long run,” McIntyre reports. “Apple is really looking to make an enormous splash with this launch, and they’ll spend anything they need to in order to get as many people to try the new platform out in the hopes that many of them will eventually make the switch from free user to paid subscriber.”
McIntyre reports, Adding celebrities like Pharrell gives listeners another reason to try it out—as if they really needed one.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’re just hours away from having legal access to just about every song ever recorded. After Apple Music debuts, the music industry will be forever changed.
Um, who?
Every generation:
Elvis who?
Led what?
The Beatles? How can that be the name of a group?
You-two? Huh?
I’ll show my age by stopping there.
I thank my parents that they had the wisdom to intentionally expose me to as many genres and generations of music as they could. The narrow selection of genres listed on iTunes only highlights the problem that Apple will have when they attempt to curate music — Apple doesn’t even know what it’s missing. I wish Apple instead made it easier for people to make and/or curate their own music. Streaming services, by their very nature, can only constrain the listener to what the major labels and service providers are interested in selling. Deep cuts from masters. classical music, your local college bands, and so forth — good luck if they don’t sell CDs at their shows. For the collector who has ripped his CDs, I can only imagine that iTunes software will continue to be degraded in performance as the bloat continues. Apple needs to devote serious attention into making both the iOS and the Mac versions of the software much more robust and easy to use. iTunes should not be showing a beachball ever on a Mac Pro, and yet, it does. Often.
I too like having been exposed to lots of differing types of music, and have ripped a lot of CDs, tapes and even old vinyl (I’m that old) into digital form. On the iTunes music front, I plan to ignore what Apple curates, and just dig around myself. I agree wholeheartedly that if Apple really could curate well in genres other than pop music, I’d me much more excited–but I can look for myself. What would really be cool would be if Apple allowed us to publicly share our own “stations” with others. That way one could, say, create a Germanic 19th Century Opera station and someone could search for it and discover operatic music from that era. Something like that is far too niche for Apple to worry about curating, but there are LOTS of people in the world, and given access to all this music, micro-curated stations would be just awesome.
We will see. Perhaps it’ll happen eventually.
I gave up on vinyl. It’s sitting in storage in the shed. It’s all probably ruined by now. Have not touched it in years.
If stored in a reasonable manner, it’s still good.
You may surprise yourself how much of the stuff you had on vinyl that you just can’t get on iTunes or whatever today. And I’ll bet there’s some impressive album art in there somewhere. Digitize it if you like the music but not the medium.
Otherwise, take those discs to one of the remaining used music stores and let someone else discover something the old-fashioned way. Probably is worth more than you think. Music is a part of culture — to be passed on.
Elvis, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin- solid music that will last for many decades. Pharrell? (Whoever he is….) A few years, maybe.
led zeppelin steals songs… exclusive on Google Music.
Taylor Swift exclusive on Apple Music. Payment and original ideas are beautiful things.
Pharell Williams, he just played to about 100,000 people this weekend at Glastonbury.
He’s happy.
There’s at least a sucker born every minute. Since the world is full, it’d be quite easy to fill up a 100K seating to listen to crap.
What is iTunes up to, song-wise? Like how many million are on there now? I am mostly a classical music junky, but still…. that many songs means lots of classical music to choose from too. Have to admit I’m getting excited!
As always, I get my new and old music from youtube.
FREEEEEEEEEEE!
95% of my extensive music library is from CDs and old cassettes. Eclectic. Not sold on iTunes. Streaming won’t do a thing for me unless Apple has been busy putting every cassette and CD in history into digital form.
Kinda like it.
Ah to be young again.
I wish Applewould let Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have a couple of hours of live uncensored DJ’ing; that I would pay for.
Keith Richards, how is that cat even alive? And will the Dixie Chicks have to change their name?
The best band that ever happened was called The Dixie Dregs. No problem keeping ‘Dixie’. It’s a good name for a dog, too.
Jeeze, Pharrell is 42? Wow.
I’m looking forward to checking Apple music out. Of course, I could not care less about the “exclusives” mentioned so far- Taylor Swift, Dre, Pharrell… How about raiding Beatles, Dylan, and Stones vaults for some deep, deep, lost & buried cuts? Now That would wake me up…
I wonder if they’ll have ocremix.org onboard? That’d be interesting, along with the sound tracks to video games and such. >
The Grateful Dead. Very simply stated.
50 Years Fare The Well.
Outsold every event this summer on StubHub. Also outsold that whiny No talent, Taylor WHO? By 65%!!
Music released today (if you can even call it music) by bling bling pimps, have no roots. It’s all FAD. Just ask that Spears whore bag. What kinda legacy did she leave? Yeah. Point made.