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Apple takes on Spotify with Apple Music

By James Lu - on 9 Jun 2015, 4:19am

Apple takes on Spotify with Apple Music

Apple's "One more thing..." at WWDC 2015 turned out to be Apple Music, the long-rumored music service that follows Apple's acquisition of Beats last year.

Beats co-founder, Jimmy Iovine, revealed Apple Music on stage at WWDC and introduced a few of its key features. Iovine says that "tens of millions" of iTunes songs will be available for streaming or saving for listening offline and, like Spotify and other music streaming apps, Apple Music's For You feature will offer recommendations based on your listening habits too. Where Apple Music differs is that, instead of using some computer algorithm to find something you may like, experts "who know and love music" will instead serve up the suggestions.

In addition to music streaming, Apple Music will also play host to a number of 24-hours a day radio stations hosted by big name artists like Dr. Dre, Will.i.am, Pharrell, and Drake acting as DJs, as well as established radio DJs. The first radio station will be called BeatsOne and will be available in 100 countries, and will be anchored by three DJs: Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden and Julie Adenuga. Subscribers can skip as many tracks as they like.

For artists (both signed and unsigned), Apple Music's Connect feature is a bit like a blog where they can post tracks, tour photos, new material and more, giving fans a glance at what's going on behind the scenes.

As for the app itself, When you open it up, it will display all of your recently added songs for quick and easy access. Tap a song to start playing it, and tap again to browse iTunes for other albums/songs from the artist. Apple Music will also support music videos. It also has Siri integration, with natural language searches, so for example, you can ask her "play the number 1 song from December 2000" and she will cue it up for you.

Apple Music will be launching on 30th June in over 100 countries (Singapore should be one of them) and will cost US$9.99/month (~S$13.50) or US$14.99/month (~S$20.30) for a family plan that can be shared by up to six people. There will be a free three month trial period for all users. As expected, it will launch first for iOS devices, but Android and Windows versions, as well as an Apple TV version, will be coming later this year. 

Windows and Android versions of Apple Music will be coming later this year.

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