The first documentary from Apple has finally arrived — and it has nothing to do with iPhones or Macs. The film, titled 808: The Movie, chronicles Roland’s legendary TR-808 drum machine and how it influenced the music industry from the ’80s all the way up to today.
Narrated by Beats 1 DJ Zane Lowe, the Apple Music exclusive features appearances by Pharrell Williams, David Guetta, Rick Rubin, Diplo, Questlove, Phil Collins, Beastie Boys and more.
Check out the trailer:
Apple Music has passed the 20 million subscriber mark, according to new figures released by Apple.
Last time the company released adoption figures, back in September, those numbers hovered around 17 million — meaning the number of paying Apple Music users jumped 15 percent in the past three months.
The days of Apple busting out hit new products every few years may be over. According to one of the best Apple analysts, Apple has been trying to de-emphasize the “home-run” mindset that made it the most enviable company in tech.
Speaking at the recent UBS Tech Conference, Horrace Dediu claimed Apple’s cultural identity is undergoing a dramatic shift.
The Rolling Stones dropped their first album in 11 years today, and to celebrate they sat down with Apple Music to talk about their love of the blues.
Apple Music’s student plan is now available in 25 additional countries around the world. The plan gives college and university students around 50 percent off a single-user account, cutting the cost to $4.99 a month in the U.S. and €4.99 in Europe.
Thanksgiving might be over, but with a new year right around the corner, it’s time to think about whether we should be thankful for Apple in 2016.
It hasn’t exactly been a spectacular year for Cupertino, but it certainly hasn’t been boring. We’ve gotten a new iPad Pro, iPhone 7 with big improvements, a greater Apple Watch, and the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and Touch ID.
But was all that enough? Is this a year you’ll look back on fondly as an Apple fan, or is it one to forget? Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight as we decide whether we’ve been thankful for Apple over the past 12 months.
Apple generously gives new Apple Music subscribers a three-month free trial before demanding its monthly fee, and now Google is beating it.
For a limited time, the company is offering four months of free access to Play Music and YouTube Red for new customers.
Canadian rap star and Apple fanboy Drake gives us a glimpse at his comical side in the company’s latest Apple Music ad by singing along to Taylor Swift while getting beaten by the bench press.
The ad is part of Apple Music’s ongoing “distractingly good” campaign, which has previously featured Swift herself.
A documentary titled 808, chronicling the cultural impact of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, will debut as an Apple Music exclusive on December 9.
Narrated by Beats 1 DJ Zane Lowe and featuring interviews with various big music names — including Apple favorite Pharrell — the documentary previously debuted at 2015’s SXSW Film Festival, although this marks its first wide release.
Check out the trailer below.
To beef up its streaming music service, Apple has hired some key employees from Omnifone, a company that was a pioneer of in music streaming industry.
Rumors floated this summer that Apple was looking to acquire Omnifone after the company filed for bankruptcy. Instead of buying the whole thing though, a new report claims that Apple instead bought some of parts of Omnifone’s tech and workforce.
The fate of Apple’s proposed data center in Ireland is finally on the fast-track.
After facing an 18-month delay due to an appeal from two Irish residents, Ireland’s High Court agreed to Apple’s request to speed up the legal process. Now instead of waiting until 2018, the court has to resolve the case within six months.
Well that didn’t last long! Having previously taken almost all of his music off streaming services due to their alleged poor sound quality, Neil Young is back on Apple Music, Spotify and Rdio — as well as new music service Amazon Music Unlimited.
The creator of the high-fidelity PonoPlayer, Young last year published a missive in which he said that he didn’t want his music to be “devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution.”
Somewhere along the way, though, it seems his stance his changed.
Forget $9.99 per month — Apple might slash the price of Apple Music subscriptions to better compete with streaming music rivals, most notably Amazon.
According to a new report, Apple could drop monthly subscription prices by as much as 20 percent. The Apple Music price drop would mean a regular subscription would cost users around $7.99 per month, while a family package would go for $12.99.
Apple can’t make enough iPhone 7 devices to satisfy demand from customers (and from Wall Street to make more money).
During Apple’s Q4 2016 earnings call today, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri hinted that big things are in the pipeline that should put the company back on track to growth — and it all starts Thursday with the MacBook Pro.
Here’s what we learned from the Q4 earnings call:
Beats co-founder and Apple employee Andre Young, aka Dr. Dre, allegedly hired a hitman to kill Suge Knight, according to a lawsuit filed by Knight.
The former hip-hop mogul who co-founded Death Row Records claims Dre tried to have him murdered because Knight was owed a $300 million payout after Apple’s $3.4 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics in 2014. That deal made Dr. Dre the first billionaire in hip-hop.
Drake is following up on his album Views, which became the first album to hit one billion streams on Apple Music, with a new song collection, scheduled to debut on the service in December.
Entitled “More Life,” Drake announced the collection during his Sunday night “OVO Sound” show on Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio station.
Watching television is still a dreadful experience, according to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior VP of internet software and services.
The Apple exec sat down for a joint interview with HBO CEO Richard Plepler at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in San Francisco today. The two media titans discussed the rapidly changing landscape of television, but Cue told the audience that more changes are needed to make the experience better.
Apple should take a note out of Jeff Bezos’ playbook and launch an Amazon Prime-style subscription service, claims an analyst for Goldman Sachs.
“We think Apple should launch a subscription bundle as a way to reinforce iPhone loyalty and leverage it into content,” Simona Jankowski writes in a new note to clients. In the brief, Jankowski and colleagues ponder the potential of a $50 monthly subscription that would get customers the latest iPhone plus other services like Apple TV, Apple Music and freemium access to the iTunes library.
An early preview of Apple’s redesigned London store reveals lots of new plants, simplified shelves and tables, as well as untethered iPhones and iPads that visitors can pick up and carry around the store.
Apple’s flagship Regent Street store, closed since June for the major remodel, is set to reopen Saturday. Early photos and a video tour show off the retail outlet’s uncluttered new look.
Apple’s newer adverts have tended to fall into either the comedy or moody art school genres. However, in its fight to grow Apple Music it just released a more traditional feature showcase ad, laying out the abilities of the “all-new” Apple Music.
Check it out below.
Apple Music has a new competitor in the form of Amazon, which today launched music streaming service Amazon Music Unlimited.
The premium service carries the same $9.99 monthly fee as Apple Music for regular users, although Prime customers get a reduced $7.99 monthly charge — while owners of the Amazon Echo can use an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription through the standalone device for a mere $3.99 per month.
Apple Music remains a long way from being a finished product, according to Apple executive and Beats Electronics co-founder Jimmy Iovine.
In a new interview discussing the struggles of building a product that fuses the worlds of tech and music, Iovine revealed that the company wants to build a product that is more than just a utility for accessing your music or getting a weekly playlist.
Apple Music and Spotify have started offering users access to unofficial, user-uploaded music remixes, courtesy of a deal with Dubset Media Holdings.
The company uses algorithms to sort out licensing and royalty payments for musical remixes. It’s an incredibly complicated problem to tackle, since a single remix might have upward of 600 different rights holders.
iOS 10 now has a larger install base than iOS 9, just over two weeks after making its public debut. Apple’s latest software has now reached 48.16 percent of all devices, while iOS 9’s share has dropped to 47.79 percent.
The first ever J.D. Power music streaming satisfaction survey found that Apple Music is the most liked streaming service in the U.S.
Spotify didn’t even manage to crack the top 3 in the survey that polled over 4,000 subscribers to music streaming services to gauge how well each company performs when it comes to performance and reliability, ease of use, cost, content, communication and customer service.