Apple Music will receive a much-needed makeover as one of the big new features in iOS 10, but according to Apple’s music guru Jimmy Iovine, it’s going to take some time before the streaming service reaches its full potential.
The Beats co-founder sat down for a post-WWDC interview with Apple execs Eddy Cue and Robert Kondrk to talk about the progress of Apple Music. Nine Inch Nails frontman and Apple employee, Trent Reznor, was also in the interview and took some shots at rivals, saying any free-tiered service is not fair to artists.
“I find YouTube’s business to be very disingenuous,” Reznor told Billboard during the group interview. “It is built on the backs of free, stolen content and that’s how they got that big. It’s making their numbers and getting them a big IPO and it is built on the back of my work and that of my peers.”
Reznor admitted that before joining Beats and then Apple that he went through a period of point fingers before realizing musicians needed to adapt to the rapid changes brought to the music industry. Apple Music has already garnered 15 million paid subscribers in its first year, but the big redesign is supposed to make it a lot easier to use.
“It’s been really interesting for me to see how this works and how much time and patience it takes,” said Rezner. “The update of Apple Music is a result of us taking a hard look at how people actually use it — not hypothetically, but realistically.”
Apple Music’s redesign features a simplified UI, big bold fonts, and better music discovery tools. The effort was led by Kindrick and Reznor, who Eddy Cue admits had become pretty decent product guy.
“I had a tremendous amount of respect for him as an artist, but I didn’t have any respect for him as a product guy,” said Cue. “And what he has done has been amazing.”
The new version of Apple Music will be available to the public this fall as part of iOS 10. Check out Cult of Mac’s iOS 10 guide to learn more about the new features packed into Apple’s new mobile operating system.
