“When Apple announced it was creating an Internet radio station called Beats 1 to go along with its Apple Music service, I was dismissive,” Mike Elgan writes for Computerworld. “It didn’t make sense. There are already thousands of Internet radio stations broadcasting worldwide that have been around for years. The DJs Apple poached from the BBC and elsewhere have been streaming music on the Internet for years — and Apple’s fans barely noticed.”
“The Internet (and to a lesser extent cable TV) has destroyed something everyone over the age of 40 used to experience all the time, which is a universal and consistent shared media experience,” Elgan writes. “For the past couple of decades, everybody who is consuming content is consuming something different from what everybody else is consuming.”
“The only time that changes is around ‘events,’ such as the World Cup, the Super Bowl or the Oscars, or catastrophes like 9/11,” Elgan writes. “Beats 1 is the only medium that offers an always-there global shared content experience.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Beats 1 is genius and the loss of the “shared experience” is an issue. Movie or TV show quotations don’t work as well after the mid-late 90s as they do prior. Too many people haven’t seen or heard it. Yes, it’s nice to have so many choices (too many?), but a shared vocabulary is important. Leave it to Apple to identify an issue and offer a compelling solution.