Three Things to Know About Apple Music

(tinkling music)

Apple is the most important company in the music industry.

From the iPod to iTunes to Beats to the iPhone,

Apple has reinvented the way we listen to music

as many times as you can think of,

and this year they tried to do it again.

Apple Music is a brand new app that's coming Jun 30th

to more platforms than you might think

for your normal Apple product.

It's coming to Mac and iOS,

but also to PC and Android and Apple TV.

It's gonna be everywhere,

and there are three basic parts of this app.

One is essentially iTunes,

but the whole library.

You can have your local library of all the songs

you bought and added to iTunes anyway,

but you can also access the whole iTunes library.

For $10 a month you can stream any song you want on-demand;

and there are these curated playlists for you,

full of new music that you might not have heard

and music that Apple thinks you'll like

and they're all human curators.

There's no algorithms here,

just people picking music you'll like.

So that's one part.

The second part is a global single radio station.

It's deejayed by three different people

in three different places:

New York,

LA and London;

and it's designed to be what Apple loves about music,

which is that everybody's listening to the same things

and sort of sharing this experience.

So the third thing is what I have the least faith in.

It's called connect,

and it's essentially a social network around musicians.

So if you're an artist,

new or old,

you can have a page and you can upload photos.

You can upload behind-the-scenes videos.

You can upload your new songs.

You can just talk to fans,

and it's designed to be a way to connect people

who love music with people who make music;

and Apple has all the scale to do this,

but what they don't have is any history

of making good social networks.

Connect is sort of a mix of MySpace and Apple's Ping,

which really didn't work very well before;

but this is unlike anything Apple has done

since the beginning of iTunes.

It's a huge sweeping play to bring

the whole music industry back into the Apple banner;

iTunes is gonna look different.

Your app is gonna look different.

The whole service is gonna look different;

and this,

according to Apple,

is what the music industry is going to look like

for the next decade.