Yesterday, June 30th, we had a pretty big update to the Apple Music app. Apple officially launched their new music streaming service for iOS devices called Apple Music that will actually make its way to Android devices (believe it or not). And it will be coming to the Apple TV as well. they also launched Beats 1, which is a “revolutionary” 24-hour radio service that is integrated into this new music app. But I wanted to give you guys a first look at Apple Music.
This is it, right here. We have a brand new icon as you can see here. If we go ahead and open it up though, we will have some tabs to choose from here at the bottom. The first tab is the “For You” tab and from here, you select what kind of music you want to listen to and you can scroll through all these bubbles that list various genres like Classic Rock, Hip Hop, Blues, Reggae, and etc. you can always add or delete these preferences in the Settings. So if you make a mistake and you accidentally clicked Reggae when you don’t like reggae, you can definitely change that so don’t worry. But who doesn’t like reggae? Let’s be serious now.
I personally like to listen to alternative indie music and Apple Music has suggested various alternative bands and I do like these bands so it appears to work very well for me. And I imagine this service will only improve once the service has more time to mature.
The next tab is the “New” tab where you’ll find various new music and hot tracks, recent releases, hot albums and top songs—all the new and popular stuff will be right here. So if you want to jam out to Taylor Swift’s 1989 album, you can do that.
The next tab is the “Radio” tab and this is where you’ll find Beats 1, which is a 24-hour radio station. But you don’t have to listen to Beats 1. You can listen to other radio stations as well like NPR, ESPN; and you’ll find other radio stations based off genres of music that you like to listen to and there are future radio stations. But basically, if you’re in the mood for something generic and you don’t want to listen to anything specific, you can check out the radio stations here. You might just like them.
We also have a tab for “Connect” which is like a social network just for artists or bands. You can follow your favorite artists here and connect with them by commenting and sharng their post. it’s kind of hard to say that this will be successful or more successful than Ping, which was their last social network for artists. But snce it is baked in Apple Muisc, it might be more popular. It’s hard to say right now since it is so new. But if you like to stay up to date with your favorite artists, you might want to check out “Connect” and see if your favorite artist is active.
The last tab is the “My Music” tab which will be home to all of your music you have stored on your device and available for offline playback. There are playlists that you can set up or you can view your library and sort all of your music via albums, songs, genres. And you can even show music that is available specifically for offline playback. The offline feature is a pretty cool feature though. It’s a feature that is found on many other music services like Spotify and Google Play Music. And it allows you to save music on your iOS device to play without internet connection.
But I do want to take a look at the music player itself. So we have album artwork upfront amnd center when you’re playing a song with paper thin icons that Apple has with this new app. If we go to the More Settings, we do have an option to start a music station based off a song you were listening to. You can add the song or album to your music library, you can show the music you are listening to in the iTunes Store to possibly purchase it and you can share the song itself or add it to a playlist.
So this is Apple Music and everyone gets 3 months for free. Once those 3 months are up, you can have a choice of signing up for Apple Music for about $10 a month or $15/month for a family pack which will give 6 users access to Apple Music.
So let me know what you think of this service. If you want me to compare it against the competition like Spotify or Google Play Music? Do you like the design and layout of this app? Will you be using it as your primary music service? These are the questions I’m curious aobut as to what your thoughts are so definitely let me know down below in a comment.