Apple doesn’t make its streaming numbers public but is showing reports to those rights holders, who have been surprised by how big those figures already are. Some streaming numbers (notably on a couple of cutting-edge hip-hop titles) are actually competitive with Spotify’s. Some rights holders feel Apple should publicize these figures; the decision to do so or not falls to Eddy Cue. But releasing the numbers would likely go a long way toward turning those who don’t yet get it into believers.
10 million subscribers in a month is an impressive number but they are likely mostly unpaid subscribers. Spotify hit 20 million paid subscribers about a month ago. It took Spotify five and a half years to get their first 10 million paid subscribers.
Take all of this with a few grains of salt. First off, it’s a rumor, no matter how believable. Second, we don’t know how many of those subscribers are purely taking a taste of the 3 month free subscription. That number may hold up over time, or it may drop once the paid conversions come due. And, of course, this is a maturing market. Part of the reason Spotify took five and a half years to get their first 10 million paid subscribers is that they were eating that early growth curve, while Apple stepped into an already relatively mature market.
Nonetheless, if true, that is a good sign for Apple Music, despite the early rough going.
UPDATE: Clarified the post with paid vs unpaid subscribers.
Apple released three new 15 second Apple Watch ads, dedicated to Music Apps, Fitness Apps, and Travel Apps. All three are shown below.
As you watch the ads, note the particular apps highlighted in each category. For example, the Music Apps ad highlights the StubHub app. The Fitness Apps ad highlights the MLB.com app.
Odd choices. Choices that seem almost shoehorned into place.
Pope Francis on Sunday became the first person registered for next year’s World Youth Day festivities, using an iPad to sign up while addressing thousands of pilgrims and tourists in Saint Peter’s Square.
“Thanks to this electronic device, I signed up as a simple pilgrim,” Francis said, declaring himself the first person registered for the next edition of the Youth Day celebration while flanked by two Polish youths.
The usual gestation period for a rabbit is a month. But Bugs Bunny, the iconic cartoon character who turns 75 on Monday, took a lot longer to come to life.
Here’s how the world’s favorite cartoon rabbit came to be. Animator Chuck Jones gave credit to Tex Avery for the character, but Warner Bros. had made several rabbit cartoons in the studio’s earlier years. There were cutesy rabbits and wacky rabbits, but those rabbits aren’t Bugs.
The video in the story is the first official appearance of the iconic rabbit. It’s remarkable how it still stands up today. As a kid, Bugs was my favorite of all of the Warner Bros. cartoons.
Police in Beijing have busted a factory that produced more than 41,000 fake iPhones worth as much as 120 million yuan ($19 million), including some that reached the United States, and have arrested nine suspects in the counterfeiting operation.
When is a social network not a social network? When “using” a social network is a requirement to access services you really wanted to use. Like email. Or videos.
I know Google wants Google+ to work, but forcing people to use it isn’t the way to make it popular. Thankfully, they’ve learned that. At least for now.
My thanks to Hullo for sponsoring The Loop this week. You already know the ergonomics of your desktop workstation are important; have you considered your sleep ergonomics?
You spend around one-third of your life sleeping—a lot of time for your head and neck to be in one position. Whether you are a side sleeper, a back sleeper, or a stomach sleeper, proper positioning and support of your head are important for quality sleep.
Have you ever used more than one pillow, or folded your pillow in an attempt to find a comfortable position? Somewhat like a bean bag, Hullo can be shaped to hold your head in a comfortable position, and keep it there throughout the night.
One simple pillow can make a difference you’ll appreciate, every night. Guaranteed. Check out Hullo.
Six firms— Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Netflix Inc. and Gilead Sciences Inc.—now account for more than half of the $664 billion in value added this year to the Nasdaq Composite Index, according to data compiled by the bitcoin motion app and confirmed by the brokerage firm JonesTrading.
The concentrated gains are spurring concerns that soft trading in much of the market could presage a pullback in the indexes. Many investors see echoes of prior market tops—including the 2007 peak and the late 1990s frenzy—when fewer and fewer stocks lifted the broader market. The S&P 500 is up 1% this year while the Nasdaq has gained 7.4%.
Other indicators are also flashing yellow. In the Nasdaq, falling stocks have outnumbered rising stocks this year, sending the “advance-decline line” into negative territory, a phenomenon that has come before market downturns in the past, investors and analysts said.
That kind of concentration is always worrying and certainly may be cause for the skittishness of Apple’s stock recently. As always, if the link doesn’t work, do a Google search on the headline. The WSJ lets Google post stories outside of its paywall.
“Live from Chateau Marmont in Hollywood,” I scramble up the best eggs in the world for my Facebook followers, to celebrate the success of my new film “Mr. Holmes”.
It’s good to see that Sir Ian cooks like mom(s) did – with no idea of how much of any ingredient to put in. Just go by feel and experience and it comes out perfectly. I’ll definitely be trying this method next time I make scrambled eggs.
One month after Apple Inc. started selling Apple Watch at its own stores, the company said it will bring the device to Best Buy stores in August.
Apple said its smartwatch will be available at more than 100 Best Buy stores in the U.S., expanding to over 300 outlets before the holiday shopping season. Best Buy will be the first major U.S. retailer beside Apple to sell the device.
This is a sign Apple wants to get the Watch in front of even more customers and that they have caught up on demand. It’s also in preparation for the upcoming holiday season when Apple expects the Watch to be a huge seller for Christmas.
From the Steve Jobs: The Man in The Machine trailer YouTube page:
Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief) pulls no punches in his portrait of Apple founder Steve Jobs and his legacy. This probing and unflinching look at the life and aftermath of the bold, brilliant and at times ruthless iconoclast explores what accounted for the grief of so many when he died. Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine is evocative and nuanced in capturing the essence of the Apple legend and his values, which continue to shape the culture of Silicon Valley to this day.
Watch the trailer, embedded below. This clicks for me. Obviously it helps that this is real footage, versus actors playing roles, but this feels real. And Gibney knows how to tell a story.
This is about what it’s like to drive a supercar for the very first time, and to do it in the unforgiving streets and avenues of New York. Here’s what I learned.
Just blocks away from picking it up, I ran the 650S at full speed over a seemingly shallow divot in the atrocious pavement that I didn’t see — I’m not sure I could’ve seen it from my vantage point. The entire car shuddered with a smack that woke me more effectively than the La Colombe coffee I’d just finished. It echoed in my brain for the next several hours. I can still hear it. No one wants to hear that sound; it’s the sound of sadness.
It’s a funny story about getting to drive a vehicle 99.9% of us will never own. His description of the streets and paranoia of driving in New York City definitely ring true for me. While I’ve never ridden a supercar in The Big Apple, I have ridden a motorcycle many times and, with their relatively unforgiving suspension, bikes can be a real challenge in Manhattan.
A beautiful scrolling time line showing the history of icons. Best viewed in a bigger browser. Works on an iPhone, but much nicer looking in a desktop browser.
With all the talk about Apple Music, iCloud Music Library, and iTunes interface issues, why not just switch to Spotify?
So I did.
Here’s what I found.
Spotify’s interface is complex and confusing, but no more so than Apple Music (and nothing could be as confusing as iTunes). There are some really nice elements to Spotify’s interface, some lessons Apple might consider. For example, in Spotify’s iOS app, if you press and hold on a playlist (don’t let go), a page of icons will appear, with one icon per song. Slide around and each song will start playing, allowing you to quickly get a sense of the music in that playlist.
Another thing I really like about the Spotify interface is how easy it is to push music to my phone for offline listening. Every playlist has a toggle marked Available Offline. Tap it, and the music starts downloading to your device. Easy peasy.
Don’t get me wrong, there are things that Apple Music does well, too, some things better than Spotify. I’d say, as far as pure capability, it’s a push.
Here are some other factors to consider.
The music libraries seem pretty comparable in size and quality (unless you are a rabid fan of Taylor Swift’s 1989). As far as I can tell, both services feature a library of about 30 million tracks.
Sharing is a push as well. If you are willing to share your Facebook credentials, you can social with other Facebook logged-in Spotify folks. I didn’t go down that path. But you can use the standard sharing mechanisms in both Spotify and Apple Music to share playlists.
Spotify allows you to follow curated, active playlists. Apple Music has a similar feature, described here.
But Apple Music benefits from being inside the walled garden. And those benefits start to stack up. Some of the more obvious benefits:
My music is available in Apple Music. I can mix and match, switch back and forth between Apple Music and my music effortlessly. I can build a playlist with both. With Apple Music, there’s no sense of inside and outside the garden. That said, there is the question of Jim’s lost music, an issue of trust, but one that can be safeguarded by a simple backup.
Only Apple Music is integrated with Siri. I can ask Siri to Play Prince Royce, Play Jazz, or Play Recent and I’m done. This is a big deal when I am very busy, don’t have my hands free, am driving, etc.
The Beats 1 experience is unique to Apple Music. There is simply nothing like it. I’m listening to live music that I can like and add to my own playlists. Apple has done an exceptional job here, bringing the traditional terrestrial radio experience into the data driven streaming music universe. Tying the analog old-school feel of human curation with my existing music library experience.
Though this may change, there is currently no way to store Spotify music on my Apple Watch. I can see what Spotify tune is currently playing, but there are times when I need music stored on my Watch and won’t have my phone nearby (going for a run, for example).
Family plan pricing. Apple Music’s family plan is $14.99 for up to six people. Spotify’s family pricing is $14.99 for me plus 1, $19.99 for me plus 2, $24.99 for me plus 3, $29.99 for me plus 4. That is a huge difference.
Bottom line, Apple Music has a distinct home field advantage. If Apple can find a way to unify the iOS and Mac universes, sand off the rough edges from both interfaces, and get Jim back on board (last I spoke with him, he was walking around with Spotify in his earbuds), this is their ball game to lose.
Me? I’m going to continue listening to Spotify, get to know it a bit more. Time will tell if I throw my long term lot in with Apple Music.
iTunes is designed by the Junk Drawer Method: when enough cruft has built up that somebody tells the team to redesign it, while also adding and heavily promoting these great new features in the UI that are really important to the company’s other interests and are absolutely non-negotiable, the only thing they can really do is hide all of the old complexity in new places.
With the introduction of Apple Music, Apple confusingly introduced a confusing service backed by the iTunes Store that’s confusingly integrated into iTunes and the iOS Music app (don’t even get me started on that) and partially, maybe, mostly replaces the also very confusing and historically unreliable iTunes Match.
So iTunes is a toxic hellstew of technical cruft and a toxic hellstew of UI design, in the middle of a transition between two partly redundant cloud services, both of which are confusing and vague to most people about which songs of theirs are in the cloud, which are safe to delete, and which ones they actually have.
Hard to argue with this take. Apple clearly has both an engineering problem and a PR problem. They’ve also got a showdown coming up with Spotify. They’ve got about two months to go in the first wave of 3 months of free service, when customers will be asked to plunk down actual cash for the privilege of continuing to use Apple Music.
More important than cash, though, is asking users to trust Apple with their existing libraries. And there’s an easy fix for that problem. As Jim learned in his Nightmare post, back up your library before you let Apple Music get its hands on it.
Backups aside, Apple and the iTunes team appear to have their work cut out for them.
Ben Wofford, writing for Rolling Stone, about the secretive community of frequent flyers whose goal in life is to outwit the airlines and fly around the world for free:
As he delved deeper, Schlappig learned about a third level, a closely guarded practice called Manufacture Spend, where Hobbyists harness the power of the multitudes of credit cards in their pockets. Airline-affiliated credit cards award points for every dollar spent, so over the decades, Hobbyists manipulated the system by putting purchases on credit cards without ultimately spending anything at all. At its simplest, this included purchasing dollar coins from the U.S. Mint with a credit card and immediately using them to pay off the charge. Schlappig read one detailed post after another that insisted Manufacture Spend was the only true way to fly for free — like sliding a coin into a slot machine and yanking it back with clear string.
Eventually, the best way he learned to visualize this bureaucratic gamesmanship was to see it as a series of table games on a sprawling casino floor — and if the airlines were the house, Schlappig realized, the Hobbyists were the card-counters.
The article was a riveting read. The whole process sounds intriguing to me, but realize that the airlines have the power to yank your frequent flyer miles if they detect misbehavior on your part.
When I think of the master pitch, I think of Steve Jobs. I’ve never seen anyone pitch like him. Jobs could sell anything, wrapped in that reality distortion field of his.
But normal people, like you and me, can do things to improve our convincing skills. The linked post dissects an Elon Musk pitch, laying out the elements that make it so effective.
Jim talks to a blogger named John Gruber about remastered music, Apple’s earnings report, and respect from readers. We have no idea what happened to Merlin.
This is the largest summertime hot air balloon festival in North America. The balloons fly twice each day for three days, compared to the nine days of ballooning in Albuquerque’s famous Balloon Fiesta which includes more than 600 balloons.
Up in the air, it was absolutely silent. Like the quietest thing I’ve ever heard (granted I live in New York, so perhaps it was more just that I appreciated such silence). Intermittent, and rather startling blasts from the propane burner kept us floating through the air. The wind wasn’t strong so we moved slowly, over houses, backyards and crowds that gathered to watch. The people waved up at us: the balloon pilots were praised like celebrities in this rural New Jersey town.
I tell all my beginner photography students – if there’s a balloon festival near you, go. You’re guaranteed to get great photos because hot air balloons are huge, colorful and only fly during the Golden Hour. No matter what kind of camera you have, you won’t be disappointed by the images you capture.
This remarkable $599 camera lets you watch while completely unobserved from distances so great that people can’t even see you, much less know that you’re watching them.
Check out the video. The camera has insane amounts of really good zoom.
My thanks to Igloo for sponsoring The Loop this week. Igloo allows you to share files, coordinate calendars, provide updates and manage projects easily.
Why use the latest, sleekest devices if you are going to use them to stare at an intranet website that looks like it was built in the 90’s?
Igloos are CSS and HTML5 friendly, which means they can be customized to look amazing.
They are also responsive right off the bat, which means that everything you can do at your desk, you can now do on the go, on your phone.
And just like your favorite Apple devices, Igloo helps you do your best work.
Share files, coordinate calendars, provide status updates and manage projects. Igloo’s not just for your traditional intranet stuff like HR policies and expense forms. It also lets you work better together with your teams.
For example, with Igloo’s latest release, Wolf, you can preview Photoshop, InDesign, HTML or CSS files straight from the platform, making it easier for co-workers to give feedback on creative assets.
Head over to igloosoftware.com to sign up for a free trial today and invite up to 10 of your favorite coworkers to try it too.
It’s been an interesting and confusing day. I arrived at Apple this morning to talk to them about my issues with Apple Music and to hopefully fix my problems. The good news is that I have about 99 percent of my music back.
Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. The missing and duplicate song issues that we’ve all seen in Apple Music are being fixed shortly. They are certainly aware of what’s been going on, I can assure you.
Now to talk about my missing music. I am an iTunes Match customer and have been since the service started. This allowed me to have all of my music in one library, match it to iCloud and then stream my songs from any device. It worked flawlessly for me. When I bought a new device, I just logged into iCloud, turned on iTunes Match and all of my songs were there.
Apple said my music was never deleted and that it was in the cloud the entire time. Before Apple Music, iTunes Match would show me all of my songs—matched, uploaded, and purchased. However, if you turn off iCloud Music Library and Apple Music, iTunes Match will only show your purchased content now. There is no way to separate iTunes Match from the iCloud Music Library. Before, you would turn off iTunes Match—now you would turn off iCloud Music Library.
So now I have the iTunes Match service that I pay for separately, and Apple Music, both of which use iCloud Music Library. There is really no way to get away from them if you want to use the latest and greatest from Apple.
I’ll admit, I’m still trying to get my head around how this works.
Some of the songs I own were incorrectly tagged as Apple Music, but that’s been fixed too, which means they show up correctly in iTunes. That is great news.
However, I’m still missing a couple of hundred songs. Apple’s theory is that I deleted them—that when I was trying to fix Apple Music, I mistakenly deleted my own files. While I concede that it is within the realm of possibility that I deleted my own files, it doesn’t make sense to me.
Here’s where my confusion comes from. I own all of Ozzy’s albums and quite a few compilations. I can’t think of a single reason why I would download an album I already own, and album that is in my iTunes Library, only to delete it. I can’t think of a good reason for that.
Here’s one possibility. Perhaps I deleted an Ozzy compilation album (I believe I did do that) that contained tracks that were also on some of his studio albums. I’m wondering if iTunes Match deleted my version of those same songs—songs that I own from my own CDs, purely because the titles were the same as those on the compilation album.
At any rate, I have most of my music back in my library. Since I don’t have access to my original Ozzy library, I will have to buy those tracks again because he is one of my all time favorites.
At this point, I’m just glad to have most of music back, but I still have no idea what happened to the other songs, for sure.
Update: I corrected the description of iTunes Match being bundled with Apple Music. They are separate services. 7/24/15 4:03 pm
