“Apple doesn’t want to be a source of free tunes, according to Jimmy Iovine, a leader of the company’s subscription music service,” Joan E. Solsman reports for CNET. “Streaming music services supported by ads are ‘building an audience on the back of the artists,’ Iovine said Wednesday at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco. A senior figure at Apple Music, Iovine characterized ad-supported streaming music as a ‘shell game.'”
“Apple Music had 11 million users as of August, according to the Cupertino, California tech giant. Iovine said Apple could quickly raise that number to 500 million if it offered a free ad-supported model,” Solsman reports. “‘We don’t want to do that,’ said Iovine, a former record producer who co-founded Beats Electronics. ‘We believe that we’ve built something powerful enough and strong enough that it will work.'”
“Apple is ‘very satisfied’ with the service, Iovine said, although he acknowledged there were some aspects of it he’d like to change,” Solsman reports. “Iovine didn’t disclose how many subscribers Apple Music has but characterized growth as ‘going really well.'”
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MacDailyNews Take: Over time, Apple Music will be the leader in music subscriptions. There are simply too many Apple devices with it built-in, sitting there tempting rabid music fans. Casual music fans will ignore it and continue to buy what they like or simply continue listening to free options. The audience for subscription music is rabid music fans, not dabblers. The question is how large is that market really? Is it 100 million (out of 7.3 billion people)? 50 million? 500 million?
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Apple Music: Gone and forgotten – October 7, 2015
So far, Apple Music has failed; it’s very difficult to justify the monthly subscription – October 5, 2015