Apple unveiled its new multimedia music service at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, June 8th. Providing streaming, downloading and radio all in one place, Cook declared that Apple Music would, “change the way you experience music forever.”
The service would cost $9.99 a month, but for five dollars more Apple Music provides a family plan, which allows one subscription to be used by multiple users in a family.
“To me, the real opportunity was when I looked at my family and I said, ‘I’ve got a spouse. I’ve got three kids. There’s no way I’m ever buying a music subscription service for the five of us. It’s just not going to happen,'” said head of iTunes Eddy Cue in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine. “So we wanted to do something really great for families… It wasn’t easy. We had to convince the labels it was in their best interests, too.”
In addition, the radio component of Apple Music, Beats 1, will have veteran DJ broadcasting from New York, London and LA.
But while Apple Music is the first service to provide a family package, Apple Music is not the first program that allows convenient listening through music streaming. It will be competing with services like Spotify, and Google’s Youtube. During the announcement of Apple Music, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek tweeted and later deleted, “Oh Ok”, and a top Rhapsody exec tweeted that he was flattered by “Apple’s virtually identical service.” Today, Spotify released a blog post mentioning that the amount of paying users to Spotify has doubled this year to 20 million subscribers.
But while Apple Music CEO Jimmy Iovine never had the chance to look over these comments when asked about them by Rolling Stone, he replied by saying that, “The hole [in the industry] is service. People need service — great service where music is concerned.”
Apple Music launches on June 30th for Apple products and for a later release on Windows and Android in the fall.
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