Apple just quietly relaunched Apple Music Connect, repurposing the name of its long-defunct social platform into something entirely different. Now it’s a centralized hub designed for record labels, music distributors and industry partners rather than fans.
Apple revives Apple Music Connect (but fans can’t join)
The original Apple Music Connect launched in 2015 as a way for artists to share content directly with fans. It functioned something like a social network baked into Apple Music. It never gained much traction, and Apple shut it down at the end of 2018 — a fate it shared with Ping. That was Apple’s earlier attempt at a music-focused social network that was removed from iTunes in 2012.
This time around, Apple isn’t trying to build a fan community. Instead, the new Apple Music Connect is a professional-facing platform. And regular users can’t even sign up. Apple’s guidance for anyone outside the industry is simply to “reach out to someone in your organization.”
What the new platform actually does
The relaunched service works much like Apple Podcasts Connect does for podcast creators. It brings together a range of existing tools under one roof, giving music industry professionals a single destination for their dealings with Apple Music. The platform is organized around several core functions.
The Promote section provides templates that labels and distributors can use to build marketing assets around a release, both for use within Apple Music and across external channels like Instagram and Twitter. And a Social Assets tool generates shareable templates tied to milestones, playlist placements and new releases.
Apple Music Pitch lets labels submit detailed information about upcoming releases directly to Apple Music’s editorial teams around the world. So it’s essentially a structured way to get artists onto Apple’s radar for playlist consideration. On the flip side, Media Requests works in the opposite direction. It allows Apple Music to ask labels for press photos and other assets needed for editorial use.
Rounding out the platform are more technical marketing tools. They include the ability to generate affiliate links, embeddable players, QR codes and badges.
Apple revives Apple Music Connect: Streamlining access
Apple Music Connect is listed as part of the broader Apple Music for Partners program. It already offered many of these features in some form. The new hub appears to be less about introducing brand-new capabilities and more about streamlining access.
So it gives industry professionals one clean, organized place to handle promotion, pitching and media coordination rather than navigating scattered tools across different parts of Apple’s ecosystem.
For everyday Apple Music listeners, nothing changes. But behind the scenes, Apple is making it easier for the labels and distributors that stock its platform to work with it more efficiently.
David Snow, an expert on Apple hardware and software, writes on a variety of technological and cultural topics for Cult of Mac. They include Apple news, technology buying guides, and features about computer setups and Apple TV shows and movies.
With 30 years of experience covering technology and other subjects, he has written and edited for numerous print and online publications, including CMP Media, TechTV.com, CNET, Wired News, Red Herring magazine, Law.com, The National Law Journal and Law Technology News magazine. Among other roles, he served as executive editor of the Law.com network of websites and editorial director, technology, for ALM Media.
Snow graduated with a B.A. from Syracuse University with majors in magazine journalism and psychology. While there, he worked as a reporter for The Daily Orange newspaper and associate editor of Equal Time magazine.
Founder of the blog At the Waterline, he can be reached on X (formerly Twitter) via @atthewaterline and on Mastodon via @dsnow.
