The labels may have resisted music streaming early on, but Warner Music Group will be grateful it’s big business today.
So big, in fact, that thanks to services like Apple Music and Spotify, streaming music just raked in more revenue than anything else last quarter.
Apple Music has a not-unimpressive 13 million subscribers right now, but Apple is looking to expand the number of customers willing to spend money on the service by targeting a group that has historically been one of the company’s strongest customer bases: students.
With that in mind, Apple today launched a new Apple Music ‘student’ pricing plan which slashes the per month cost in half ($9.99 down to $4.99 in the United States) for anyone in higher education.
Apple Music has had a pretty rough first year. Despite gaining millions of subscribers and setting download records with some of its more high-profile releases, users still have plenty to stop them from quite clicking on that heart next to the service.
And that’s not just because nobody’s really sure what the hell Apple Music hearts do.
But one man has had such a bad experience that the Apple Support representative he spoke to gave him some advice that was almost certainly not in her training. And he’s shared his story online to warn others away from what has happened to him.
Apple’s big bet on Drake is paying off huge for both sides and shattering records in the process.
Drake’s new album Views is only available on Apple Music, but it’s already been streamed over 250 million times in its first week and his album sales are on pace to be the biggest release by a male artist since Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience.
With 13 million subscribers, Apple Music is pretty far from being a failure. At the same time, it’s fair to say that the service probably hasn’t been met with the rapturous applause which greeted, say, the launch of the iTunes Store back in 2003.
That’s about to change at WWDC, however, with Apple rumored to be using the developer conference to unleash “sweeping changes” to its streaming music service.
An Apple-sponsored exhibition featuring dozens of weirdly wonderful gowns — some produced using 3-D printers, lasers and other exotic techniques — should challenge people’s assumptions that handmade items are inherently better, according to Jony Ive.
Apple’s chief design officer talked up the power of machine-powered manufacturing when he took center stage at this morning’s press preview for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Manus x Machina exhibition. The show, which opens today in New York City, explores the relationship between fashion and technology with a gallery of more than 150 unique couture gowns from designers such as Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, Christian Dior, Miuccia Prada and Yves Saint Laurent.
Whether it’s hosting a show on Beats 1, sporting a vintage Apple jacket, or having his music tirelessly promoted in Apple Music ads, Drake’s about as established a part of Cupertino these days as Eddy Cue’s collection of Hawaiian shirts.
No surprise then that everyone’s favorite Canadian Degrassi actor-turned-bad-boy-rapper just chose iTunes and Apple Music as the place to debut his new, fourth studio album Views.
Apple has released a major update for Apple Music for Android that adds support for music videos to the app. The app, however, continues to remain in beta.
As news of Prince’s unexpected death spread today, shocked fans hoping to stream his tunes on Apple Music came up empty.
In the streaming era, the incredibly prolific musician — best known for his string of hits and Grammy Awards in the 1980s — is practically a ghost.
Kanye West tricked fans into subscribing to Tidal, claims a new class-action lawsuit against the rapper for backtracking on his commitment to make ‘The Life of Pablo’ a Tidal exclusive.
Yeezus originally proclaimed that his highly anticipated new album would be available exclusively on Tidal and would never go on sale. In a Twitter rant a few days after the album’s release, West told fans the album would “never ever be on Apple,” only to turn around a month later and put it on Apple Music and Spotify.
It looks like it’s about to all fall down on Kanye, Jay Z and Tidal, now that some gold diggers are claiming it was all just a ploy to boost Tidal’s subscribers.
Taylor Swift continues her about-turn on Apple Music by appearing in a new ad for the streaming music service, in which the hit-maker rocks out to Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” while appearing to get ready for a night on the town.
Check it out below.
Drake’s apparently making bank off of a recent Apple Music ad featuring Taylor Swift faceplanting onto a treadmill.
The video launched less than a week ago on April 1, and since it went live, iTunes sales of Drake’s song “Jumpman,” which features prominently in the spot, have more than quadrupled, Billboard reports. And the playlist Swift pulls up to motivate herself for her cardio workout is showing pretty good numbers on Apple’s streaming service, too.
If you aren’t one of the millions of people who has already seen the Apple Music ad, you can check it out below.
Festivities for Apple’s 40th birthday have spilled over onto Apple Music this week, with an all-new playlist that celebrates songs from the company’s iconic ads over the years.
The 40-song playlist spotlights some of the best tunes of the present and the past. It’s available to all Apple Music subscribers, and includes hits from The Beatles, Rolling Stone, Eminem, Adele, Daft Punk, Lauryn Hill, Coldyplay, U2 and Bob Dylan.
Check out the full track list:
Taylor Swift hates doing cardio! The latest ad for Apple Music pits the singer against one of the most ferocious machines in the gym: the dread treadmill.
It’s Swift’s first appearance in an Apple ad, and it also reveals that the country-turned-pop star has a soft spot for hip-hop icons Drake and Future. She says her hilarious ad is “based on real events” that reveal her alien talent for rapping and keeping on beat no matter what happens.
Watch Tee Sweezy drop the bars below:
Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo album has arrived on Apple Music — making something of a mockery of Mr. Kim Kardashian’s claim last month that the album would “never never never be on Apple.”
We guess by “never” he meant “you’ll have to wait six more weeks.”
Apple turns 40 years old today, and what a journey it’s been: from a promising homebrew startup to an underdog fighting off bankruptcy to an industry-straddling behemoth with $233.7 billion in revenue, all thanks to the vision of the co founder of apple.
It’s impossible to boil down every significant Apple event into one story, but we did our best to pick out the 40 most significant moments in the company’s past.
Check out these key moments in Apple history below.
Apple Music’s competition in the music streaming battle just got a little fiercer today with the introduction of a new subscription service by SoundCloud.
The new SoundCloud Go service costs $10 per month, giving you unlimited access to the YouTube of Audio’s vast trove of indie content without ads. You can also save files to listen to offline, but that might not be enough to take on Apple Music and Spotify.
The next piece of original video content coming out of Cupertino is going to look more like a big iPhone ad than a TV show.
Apple revealed today that is working with Black Eyed Peas singer and failed tech visionary Will.i.am to create a new unscripted TV series that’s all about apps.
Apple is teaming up with Vice for a new six-part documentary that will stream exclusively on Apple Music.
The Score will spotlight music scenes from around the world that are lot more diverse and rich than your typical five-day outdoor EDM rave. The first episode called “Reservation Rap” debuts this week and covers Minnesota Red Lake Reservation’s unique hip-hop style created by the Ojibwa tribe.
Watch members of the third largest indigenous tribe in North America spit some bars:
I recently expressed my frustrations with Apple Music and why I didn’t plan to continue using the service. I want to love Apple Music. Siri integration and the ability to have a singular place to listen to all my music, both streamed and purchased, would be a dream come true.
Unfortunately, Apple Music currently has far too many shortcomings and quirks for me to take it seriously. However, with the help of these third-party apps, I’ve found using Apple Music to be far less painful — and, in some cases, even enjoyable.
If you’re a fan of EDM (that’s “electronic dance music” for the older Cult of Mac readers out there!), Apple Music is about to become your best option for streaming music — courtesy of a new deal Apple has signed that will let it bring thousands of rare DJ mash-ups, remixes, and mixtapes to its subscription music service.
Beats 1 just announced its biggest dance music collaborator yet, in the form of massively-popular, 35-year-old Canadian house music producer Joel Thomas Zimmerman, a.k.a. Deadmau5.
Whether it’s proclaiming himself the next Steve Jobs, screening the recent Aaron Sorkin movie as a birthday gift for his wife, appearing with a rare custom gold-band Apple Watch Edition, or inviting Steve Wozniak to be one of the first to see his baby daughter, Kanye West has always been an enormous Apple fan.
That appears to have changed, however, with the mercurial rapper/pop star sending out a series of bizarre tweets in which — among many, many other things — he pleads with Facebook and Google (but not Apple) to invest $1 billion in “Kanye West ideas” and says that his latest album will never appear on Apple Music.
The first piece of original programming to come out of Apple may star none other than the company’s own employee: Andre Young, aka, Dr. Dre.
The hip-hop mogul turned Beats co-founder is reportedly starring and executive producing the first-ever scripted TV series bankrolled by Apple, but it’s still unclear how Dre’s production will be distributed.
One of Apple Music’s biggest competitors is looking to sellout.
Pandora, the music streaming service with more users than Spotify and Apple Music, has reportedly been meeting with private parties regarding a possible sale of the company after experiencing its slowest amount of growth ever last year.