Apple's Respect For Music Challenged

Apple’s latest advert for Apple Music ran during the Country Music Association’s Awards ceremony. Fronted by singer-songwriter Kenny Chesney, he talked about the power of his music, and the effort that he puts in for his fans. He asked for a place where music has human element because “music is the last real thing we got”.

And in all of this talk of the special place that music has, of how music and creatives need be treasured, the final message of the advert screams that you can have ‘three months free’.

For all of the strong numbers posted by Apple, its adventures in the streaming music subscription space has been underwhelming. Given Apple’s size, Cupertino was always going to be able to capture a significant share of the market, but it still believed that it had to push hard to promote the service.

Apple Music was rolled into an iOS update, forcing the client onto every iOS handset. It overloaded the already clunky interface that makes up the music playing app on iPhone and iPad. It saw the Windows and OSX versions of iTunes forced to balance yet another bolt-on feature on top of the already sprawling code. If you use any Apple products, there was no way you would miss Apple pushing the service to you. Which was all the more painful because of the bugs in Apple Music that wrecked countless iTunes libraries around the world.

As Apple announced details of the service, it assumed that artists would be happy to see their music downloaded and consumed for three months without any recompense, presumably because of the amazing exposure that Apple Music would offer them. It is only now, some five months after the launch of the service, that many users will be seeing the impact of the first month’s subscription on their credit card bills. 

The free three months coupled with the typically long billing cycles in the credit card industry has kept the financial impact of Apple Music away from the consumers until now.

You could say this is to allow consumers to get a good feel for the service and the value for money it offers, but I’m more inclined to think that it gives users more time to download vast collections of music, build up playlists of content only available on subscription, and generally work to get lock-in through the emotive connections that music makes (and once that is sorted, do it all over again on Android).

 I’m not sure how a global radio station adds the human touch to everyone’s music collection. I’m not sure I can balance this altruistic view of music and the creative process with a reliance on star power to advertise the service, an all-you-can-listen to subscription model that was promoted by force to every Apple user, and the idea that every performer would be happy to have their work downloaded for free over the three-month trial period in exchange for the old chestnut of ‘exposure’. Chesney talks about a place that offers “real reverence and respect” for music.