Apple has expanded Apple Music student membership program to 25 new countries including Canada, China, India, and Russia. Those who sign up for the membership will be able to avail the company’s music streaming service for about half the standard monthly subscription rate.
Apple announced Apple Music student membership in May this year, though at the time it was available to students in only seven countries — Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The student membership program is now also available in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, Colombia, Finland, France, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates.
Apple, as always, has partnered with UNiDAYS, a service that focuses on offering big savings to students. Among other things, UNiDays helps companies validate student enrolment and verify if a user is still a student at a university. Some other partners of UNiDays include Spotify, New Look, MissGuided, and Urban Outfitters.
Though student membership program makes Apple Music affordable to students everywhere, things are a little too enticing in India, where an eligible student will be able to avail the service for a monthly charge of about Rs 60 (88 cents). Apple Music was launched in India for Rs 120 ($1.75) a month for an individual user and Rs 180 ($2.62) for a family plan.
The move could help the company drive a lot of new customers to its music streaming service. As of September, Apple Music had 17 million paid subscribers. Apple Music rival, Spotify had 40 million paid subscribers as of September. Spotify also offers discounts to students.
for Android has graduated out of "beta" status after its introduction in November 2015.
Version 1.0.0 of the app is now available to download from the Google Play Store for Android devices running 4.3 and higher.
There aren't many new noteworthy updates to Android's Android Music app. The change log in the big 1.0 version includes: "This update includes equalizer settings and a variety of performance, playback, and stability improvements."
Apple Music for Android didn't launch to great fanfare, especially for non-Apple fans. The app was hit with 1-star reviews just because. But it looks like most Android fans using Apple Music and writing reviews are enjoying it. The app currently has a 3.3-star (out of 5) rating.
One reason to like the Apple Music Android app is that it actually uses a more Android-like design language. Compare that to how Google designs its apps for iOS, which uses its Material Design guidelines and doesn't work like an iOS app, with icons and fonts that just clash.
Apple's decision to go with a native app shows the company was serious about getting all the details right and respectfully courting Android users.
Launched a little over a year ago, Apple music has grown to number 15 million subscribers. In comparison, Spotify has over 100 million subscribers.
T-Mobile's Binge On service, which excludes certain video services from counting toward a user's monthly data plan, now includes music videos from Apple Music.
In a blog post on Tuesday, T-Mobile CEO and president John Legere announced Apple's music streaming service along with a dozen additional video services including ABC, DISH Anywhere, Nat Geo TV and Fox Now are now a part of the carrier's growing list of Binge On service.
Though Apple Music is already a part of T-Mobile's Music Freedom program, which allows the carrier's Simple Choice plan customers to stream music from participating music services without it counting toward their data plans, the latest addition includes the video content in the app, making the entire service essentially data-free.
With the new additions, more than 100 video services are now part of Binge On, which was created eight months ago, and exempt from eating up a user's monthly data plan.
According to T-Mobile, more than 765 million hours of video have been streamed through Binge On since its launch.
The full list of new video content providers added to Binge On follows below:
Good news Apple Music subscribers: Apple is updating the way its “match” feature works.
Not only is the matching algorithm now better (matching from audio fingerprints instead of metadata), tracks you upload to iTunes from Apple Music will no longer have DRM.
In other words, it will now work exactly the same way as the existing iTunes Match feature.
When Apple Music debuted last year, one of the benefits of the service was that any music already in your iTunes library that you didn’t buy from Apple could be uploaded to the cloud for access later.
Apple would simply match the tracks it could in its library (Amazon and Google both offer similar services). The problem – and what made Apple Music’s matching different from iTunes Match – was that it would attach DRM to any of those uploads.
That might be OK if you stay an Apple Music subscriber forever. (Actually, no, I take that back. It’s never OK to put DRM on non-DRM content that you upload to the cloud.) But it presents problems if you cancel the service because any tracks you download back to your computer now have DRM on them.
This is, in fact, the same version of iTunes Match that iTunes users could pay for as a separate subscription since Apple began offering it years ago. I am one of those users. However, all subscribers to Apple Music will get the new version of iTunes Match at no extra cost. This update also means that all Matched songs will download DRM-free.
This also means that if you’re someone like me — who both pays for iTunes Match (which is $25 a year) and subscribes to Apple Music — you can go ahead and dump that extra iTunes Match subscription.
Like The Loop's Jim Dalrymple, I probably won’t be getting rid of my iTunes Match subscription immediately, just to be safe, but it's great that in the future dual users won’t have to pay that $25 a year.
It’s also great that Apple is making the match experience in Apple Music a first-class citizen.
One reason I use Apple Music over Spotify is the fact that all of my local music is accessible too. (I subscribe to both services, along with Tidal and YouTube Red, and I pay for Amazon Prime.) It’s awesome to be able to pull up an old playlist I made years ago or limited-edition versions of albums that aren’t in modern streaming catalogs.
Now, Apple Music subscribers can take advantage of all that stuff without having their own files encumbered in DRM.
Apple says they are rolling out the new match to 1 to 2 percent of Apple Music subscribers every day. You’ll know you have the new system when your matched files say “Matched” in the iCloud status column in iTunes on your Mac or PC.
Apple has rejected an update to Spotify's iOS iPhone app, and Spotify is crying foul.
In a letter sent to Apple's top lawyer on June 26 and obtained by Recode, Spotify general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said that Apple cited "business model rules" for turning down an update to its iOS app. But according to the site, Gutierrez considers the move anti-competitive, and used his letter to suggest that Apple was using its approval process to hurt competitors of Apple Music.
"This latest episode raises serious concerns under both U.S. and EU competition law," he wrote, according to Recode. "It continues a troubling pattern of behavior by Apple to exclude and diminish the competitiveness of Spotify on iOS and as a rival to Apple Music, particularly when seen against the backdrop of Apple’s previous anticompetitive conduct aimed at Spotify … we cannot stand by as Apple uses the App Store approval process as a weapon to harm competitors."
Apple's reason for rejecting the update seemed to stem from a promotion whereby new subscribers could sign up for Spotify for $0.99 if they signed up on Spotify's website. According to Recode, Spotify was attempting to promote the campaign inside the app when Apple threatened to remove the app from its store.
Apps have been barred from sending users to sign-up for services outside of an app since 2011. If a subscription service wants to charge users inside its app, it must use the iTunes billing service. Apple takes a 30 percent cut of in-app purchases.
While the streaming service complied and stopped promoting the campaign inside the app, it turned off its App Store billing option, according to Recode.
In a statement on Thursday, Jake Ward, president and CEO of the Application Developers Alliance, said Apple was "deliberately creating friction."
“For the app marketplace to continue to thrive, users to have choices, and developers to have a competitive opportunity, platforms must give publishers clear and consistent guidelines," he wrote. "Platforms deliberately creating friction and obstacles between publishers and users is bad for business and ultimately hurts consumers.”
A representative for Apple did not respond to Mashable's request for comment. Spotify declined to comment on the record.
Despite months of varying complaints about Apple Music, the service has nevertheless garnered a healthy following, well over 15 million paid subscribers according to Apple.
On Monday, Apple announced an update to the app coming in iOS 10 (expected in the fall) that may help millions of existing and potential new users get more out of the app.
The app has been redesigned from the ground up. The new design is meant to be more intuitive and simple, an interface shift that many users have been requesting.
Now when you open the app the first thing you'll see is your music Library, which gives you access to a new section called Downloaded Music.
Apple has also added lyrics to the app's music selections (when you scroll down from the top of the currently playing song), which was demonstrated on stage by Apple Music's head of global marketing, Bozoma Saint John, using the song "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang.
The company also showed off daily curated Playlists. Additionally, the Connect section allows you to follow the feeds of your favorite artists. Apple also demonstrated the new, more simplified looks of Browse, Top Charts, Radio and Stations.
Will it be enough to convince some users not already on Apple Music to give it a try? Only time will tell, but this early look at the new Apple Music is indeed a lot more attractive and as a result could be a little easier to user.
Apple Music was officially released last June, after a splashy introduction at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The service, which Apple says now boasts 13 million paying subscribers, competes directly with Spotify (the biggest player in the streaming music), Google, Amazon and Tidal.
Apple may have been early to digital music sales, but it took a long time for the company to start playing the streaming game. A year later, the service is growing, but that may be in spite of itself.
Last week, a number of stories about Apple Music — including a horror story from a user who saw his entire music collection disappear from his hard drive — made the news. It's unclear how much Apple Music was responsible and how much was user error, but it got me thinking about my own issues with Apple Music, and what could be improved.
I still largely stand by what I wrote in my half of Mashable's Apple Music review last year — mainly that the library and music curation are top-notch but there are complaints, mostly that the app itself is a cluttered experience. No music service is perfect (believe me, I subscribe to five of them), but Apple Music's problems are unique, since they stem from Apple's history as a leader in digital music sales and downloads.
Once you see where the problems originate, though, it's easier to see what Apple needs to do to make its streaming service better. Here's my seven-point plan for fixing Apple Music.
1. Separate it from iTunes
Apple Music, the streaming service, should be its own app, and there should be a different standalone app for your downloaded tracks. The idea of having it all essentially live inside iTunes (especially on the desktop) makes sense insofar as Apple wants to put all your music in one place, but in practice, it can be daunting.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be able to access your purchased or cloud-uploaded tracks from within Apple Music — those two worlds need to be linked — but there should still be a totally separate app for listening to music downloads, and that goes for computer, iPhone or iPad.
At the very least, this would make the experience easier for users who have iTunes purchases but don’t subscribe to Apple Music. And I would argue it would make it even easier for Apple Music users to just focus on the service itself.
Right now, Apple is treating non-Apple Music subscribers as second-class citizens in the Music app. That’s not OK. You can pimp the benefits of your own service without degrading the experience for everyone.
Moreover, on the desktop, Apple Music needs to be its own app. Not only is iTunes an albatross that just keeps getting more bloated, separating the app (again, you can still link your local files with it if you want — the same way Spotify does) will let the features of the service itself shine.
For years, we've been begging for a full iTunes overhaul. If Apple isn't prepared to kill iTunes completely, it should at least offer a simpler, more focused Apple Music app on the desktop.
And on iOS, Apple needs to make it easier to listen to the tracks stored locally.
2. Make playlists searchable and social
Apple Music playlists should be easy to share and discover.
IMAGE: SCREENSHOT FROM ITUNES
One of my big complaints with Apple Music when it debuted was that discovering and sharing playlists is a pain.
On Spotify (and Rdio, RIP), you can make a playlist public and searchable. This is great because it lets people find all the music from a TV show or playlists dedicated to mood or even moments in time.
Apple Music lacks this essential social feature. Although the playlists Apple Music curates are often very good, there's no way to easily share a custom playlist with the community.
To be clear, I can share a custom playlist, but the playlist isn’t searchable. It isn’t discoverable. Moreover, there isn’t way to embed a playlist — not even with even just the previews of songs — on the web.
That’s part of what makes Spotify so great. It’s also part of the reason I find myself making fewer playlists in Apple Music than I do in Spotify. With Spotify, I can at least easily share them with friends.
3. Create a web experience
Apple Music is available on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, making it one of the most cross-platform pieces of software Apple has ever created. But It’s not available on the web.
This is a huge missed opportunity. Not everyone wants to download iTunes to listen to music. Even with a separate Apple Music app, there's no reason why there can’t be a web component to Apple Music.
Whether Apple likes it or not, Chromebooks are a real thing. And yes, maybe Apple can convince some users to not buy a Chromebook and get an iPad Pro instead, but something tells me Chromebook’s market share is only going to increase.
Moreover, consumers just expect to be able to listen to their tunes from a web browser.
If I’m at a friend’s house, I like that I can login to my Spotify account from their browser to play an album or playlist. I like the freedom it gives me to offer music everywhere.
Moreover, even if you just offer track previews, web players help stuff go viral. If I can listen to an exclusive Apple Music track in Chrome without it having to open up iTunes, that’s better for everyone.
Apple Music has some limited Facebook support but that’s not enough. It should join the rest of the streaming services on the Internet.
4. Fix iTunes Match or offer a plain, straightforward cloud upload
IMAGE: APPLE
In the blog post I mentioned earlier about the epic Apple Music disaster, one of the focal points of the story was how iTunes Match works (or doesn’t).
Apple introduced iTunes Match back in 2011. For $25 a year, you can upload up to 100,000 tracks to the cloud. When it can, Apple will match those tracks with stuff iTunes offers. The original value proposition here was that if you had an old 128kbps MP3 rip of Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” (one of the first 10 MP3s I ever downloaded back in 1998), it could be matched with the higher-quality 256kbps file that's in iTunes.
But iTunes Match has had plenty of problems over the years. First, it used to match the wrong versions of songs (meaning your explicit-tagged Jay-Z albums were now neutered) — and although Apple has fixed many of those mismatches, more seem to crop up all the time.
Sometimes, iTunes will match the wrong version of a file. This can be aggravating if you’re the type of person who appreciates that there are four or five different versions of a particular song.
Things get even murkier when it comes to live recordings. I’ve had live recordings match to the studio recordings (which is annoying but expected), but I’ve also had playlists (or full albums) replace the album version with a live bootleg I uploaded.
And while I understand that a big reason Apple matches songs is to save some space on Apple’s servers (Apple doesn’t need to have millions of different uploads of “…Baby One More Time” for every user who wants to upload the recording to the cloud), users who pay the $25 a year for iTunes Match should be able to select which files are matched and which files are simply uploaded to iCloud.
In fact, if Apple can’t get its matching to work more reliably, I think it should just ditch iTunes Match as a service altogether (because in 2016, how many people still have active libraries full of songs that are under CD-quality) and treat it like a standard music locker.
Because for me (and most users I know), that’s the real value of iTunes Match: Access to all of your tunes on all of your devices. I happily pay $25 a year for iTunes Match, not because I want higher-quality matched files (all my music is encoded in a way that is at least as good as how Apple encodes its files) but because I have 17 years worth of digital music that I like being able to access anywhere.
In other words, let me upload my non-iTunes purchased MP3s to iCloud. Forget about matching the songs — just let me upload my tunes to iCloud and then let me access those tunes inside Apple Music. Amazon and Google offer this service, and Apple should too.
Apple could even count against my iCloud storage for music for users that don’t want to pay for the matching service. Yes, it means paying Apple for more storage, but if the choice is unreliable and frustrating matching, it's an easy choice.
5. Drop Connect
Recording artist Drake speaks about Apple Music during the Apple WWDC on June 8, 2015 in San Francisco, California.
IMAGE: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
Apple already tried its hand at a music-based social network with Ping back in 2010. It was a disaster.
Apple tried again to get into social with the Connect tab for Apple Music. At the time, Apple touted this as a way musicians could connect directly with fans — posting photos, snippets of tracks, demos and other information to a feed that lived within the Apple Music experience.
Everyone I spoked to at Apple seemed really excited about Connect. Trent Reznor, who is rumored to be overhauling the new Apple Music, was particularly excited about the service.
But almost a year later, Connect has failed to deliver. For anyone.
In my original preview of Apple Music last June, I wrote this about Connect:
I’m not sure if Connect is going to work. It’s a great idea but to work will require that artists actively use it. Without seeing the toolset Apple is offering the artists to publish content, it’s hard for me to know whether they’ll bother with Connect or if they’ll just continue posting photos to Instagram, music clips to Soundcloud and videos to YouTube.
My fears have largely proven to be true. With few exceptions, very little content posted to Apple Music is that different than what could be posted on SoundCloud or Instagram. Moreover, engagement on Connect — if the comment and like counts in the feed are to be believed — are incredibly low.
Moreover, the experience for musicians who don’t have a large A&R team is far from ideal. My friend Dave Wiskus wrote about the struggles he had getting his band Airplane Mode working within the world of Connect.
Six months later, he wrote again about how the experience has shaped up.
His takeaway:
If Connect is a social network, it fails miserably. There’s nothing inherently social about the experience, which feels more like a local bulletin board than a way for artists to engage with fans.
It’s also not a very good broadcast medium. Sure, I can post to Connect and share out to Twitter and whatnot, but why? There’s nothing unique or powerful about Apple’s system that makes it a good hub. Because I have no idea how many followers we have, I can’t even make a numerical argument for Connect-first posting. And since we can’t even invite people from other places to follow us on Connect, there’s no incentive to try.
As a fan, it’s a confusing mess. As an artist, it’s a black hole. All media, no social.
The idea behind Connect was good: Offer bands a way to share stuff with fans.
But like so many social music plays, it hasn’t worked. And in fairness to Apple, no service has really managed to connect artist and fans together since the heyday of MySpace. Spotify has struggled to get engagement and socialization between the two groups. SoundCloud has probably come the closest over the years, but it’s a very different service than Apple Music.
And here’s the real truth: If the best Apple Music can do is offer a poor man’s SoundCloud experience with no engagement or user interest, why even bother?
6. Put discovery front and center
The best part of Apple Music for me is its For You section of recommendations. It takes a different approach from Google’s Songza-fueled mood playlists or Spotify’s Discovery Weekly playlist and instead offers a little bit of both.
The best part is that if you do use iTunes — or Apple Music — a lot, the recommendations in the form of playlists and albums gets better all the time.
The album and playlist offerings it shows me continue to be accurate and it’s one of the main reasons I use the service.
IMAGE: ELIZABETH PIERSON/MASHABLE
And although Apple is smart about making it the first tab in the Music App on iOS, it feels like For You is buried on the desktop.
Moreover, I’ve also come to really enjoy the New section which shows off the best new content each week. From the updated genre playlist (which Apple Music editors curate) of best new tracks to a listing of hot tracks just released to the service, this is a great way to find great stuff to listen to.
But I wonder if New and For You should be separated. Having a dedicated section to New is fine, but I would love to see the playlists I follow make their way into For You.
Speaking of Discovery: Since I can follow artists on Apple Music, I’d love to get app notifications when a new album or track is released. This is what Connect was ostensibly supposed to be for, but it doesn’t work that well.
Spotify pushes me notifications when my favorite band releases a new track or album; why doesn’t Apple Music? I mean, even iTunes — which is technically connected to Apple Music — will send me an email letting me know Radiohead has released a new album because I’ve purchased Radiohead stuff in the past.
The recommendations are great. The surfacing of new content is solid. Now I want Apple to go to the next level and start anticipating the stuff I want to listen to as soon as it comes out.
7. Fix the damn bugs
I use Apple Music every day, and every day, I run into bugs. Most of the time, those bugs are based on the way my local/uploaded music conflict with stuff I’ve added to my Apple Music library. Sometimes there are issues with playlists (like the time each Apple Music playlist I follow showed up twice in my library), and sometimes I run into problems trying to download files to listen to them offline (whether the track is part of my purchased library or in Apple Music).
For me, none of the bugs are deal-breakers, but I can’t help but feel like I don’t encounter as many problems when I use Spotify.
Apple’s cloud game has issues — that’s true for all of its services — but music is an area where messing up can be really, really bad. Music is an inherently personal experience and no user should be faced with the worry that unsubscribing to a service will delete their files. Or that their meticulously tagged tunes will now be out of place.
Final Notes: Apple Music is not a failure
Apple Music is not perfect, but I bristle when I see the service categorized as a flop, a failure or a disaster.
It’s not. Any service that can pickup 13 million paying users in nine or ten months — especially when the competition (Spotify, YouTube) is not slowing down — is a success in my book.
And as someone who subscribes to every major streaming service (sigh), I still find myself using Apple Music the most when I’m on mobile. And the For You recommendations are always on point.
But I still won’t give up Spotify. And for a lot of users, the decision of whether to pay for Spotify or Apple Music isn’t going to be based on which service gets Drake’s album first (or even which service has access to Taylor Swift’s full catalog) — it comes down to the experience.
Apple can improve that by separating the app from iTunes, making sharing playlists a real thing, bringing the service to the web, and doubling down on recommendations. Dump Connect and finally make its song matching work (and if that can't be done, it should migrate to a true locker service).
If Apple does even half of these things, I think the value proposition of Apple Music would be much stronger. With a targeted push, Apple could once again become what it once was: a leader in digital music.
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