Photo: Apple
Apple has entered the streaming music market after many years sitting on the sidelines this Monday with Apple Music, their Spotify killer.
The Cupertino based company well known for changing the music industry already with the iPod will now again exert its dominance in the digital music marketplace.
The service will feature a 24 hour radio station that will see former Radio 1 presenter Zane Lowe reappear in Los Angeles from his hiatus as the station's face of music.
The service was described by Apple CEO, Tim Cook as "the next chapter in music" and will feature personal recommnedations from other users as well as a new Apple Music Connect feature which will allow artists to reccomend songs directly to users.
Like iTunes, the service will be also be available to Windows users as well as in iOS and OS versions. It will be released on June 30th, with an Android version following in Autumn.
Apple Music was built by Dr Dre's Beats team which was acquired by Apple last year for $3 billion.
"2015 music industry is a fragmented mess," said Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine as he introduced Apple Music on-stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. "Do you wanna stream music? You can go over here. If you wanna stream video, you can check some of these places out. If you wanna follow some artists, there’s more confusions with that, so I reached out to Tim Cook and Eddy Cue and said: 'Guys, can we build a bigger and better ecosystem with the elegance and simplicity that only Apple can do?' All the ways you love music, all in one place, and that place is in almost a billion hands all around the world already: one single app on your iPhone."
The service will cost $9.99 (likely £9.99 in the UK), the first three months will be free and there will be a family plan available for $14.99. It will launch in 100 countries and will have a catalogue of millions of songs and videos available to stream on demand. There will also be a wide variety of playlists created by Apple's inhouse editors as well as by big name musicians.
Zane Lowe will head up the music station Beats 1 which will broadcast 24 hours a day from LA, New York and London. Zane will be joined at the station by his former Radio 1 producer James Bursey who was also pouched from the station earlier this year. Three more producers from the BBC are also rumoured to have left the station for LA's warmer climes. Which shows how serious Apple is in adding something more to the streaming service than just algorithms suggesting playlists.
Competition is now likely to hot up for the dominant Spotify streaming service, as well as smaller players like Rdio and Amazon, as well as Google's ubiquitous YouTube.
