Apple Music launches on Android

Apple Music has arrived on Android. The app launched in the Play Store today and is available in every region that Apple Music currently serves, except for China. Most of Apple Music's features have made the jump, including Beats 1, Connect, and custom music suggestions; the only things that aren't available are music videos and the ability to sign up for a family plan. The details come from TechCrunch, which spoke with Apple's Eddy Cue about the launch. The app is said to be in a "beta" release for now, with its missing features being added back in before that label is removed.

This is Apple's first real Android app; its others are Beats' products and a migration tool, making this the first Apple-branded app that people will continually use. Apple has even tried to make it "look and feel like an Android app," Cue tells TechCrunch. Though it doesn't exactly go all in on Google's Material Design style, flourishes have been changed here and there to make Apple Music look much less like an app designed for iOS. The app still relies on an Apple ID for sign ups, and existing subscribers will be able to use their account to sync any music that they've already set up. Like on iOS, Apple is offering a free three-month trial period for new users on Android.

Amazon’s Streaming Music

 The music industry’s streaming wars are usually seen as having three major combatants: Spotify, Apple and Pandora.

Over the last year, however, another technology giant, Amazon, has been quietly building a competitor with a slightly different approach. Amazon Prime Music, available to subscribers of the company’s $99-a-year Prime membership program, offers more than one million songs — a fraction of the catalogs available from services like Spotify and Apple Music, which each say they have more than 30 million tracks. And Prime Music lacks current hits by acts like Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and the Weeknd.

Yet the company has begun to establish itself by focusing on what may be a vast part of the audience for streaming music: casual listeners and families. This part of the market, analysts say, may not mind the absence of a few current hits, especially considering that they can also receive the shipping discounts and streaming video offerings — like the Emmy-winning show “Transparent” — available to Prime members. And they may appreciate a surprise or two, like “Indie for the Holidays,” a playlist of 26 songs that Amazon commissioned from acts like Lisa Loeb, Rogue Wave, Robert Pollard and Langhorne Slim that will be available free for Prime members next week.

“There are people on the cutting edge of music who really want to be deep into the catalog, and then there are a lot of mainstream music fans for whom just having some good music to listen to is sufficient,” said Russ Crupnick of the consumer research firm MusicWatch. “That’s where a service like Amazon works out just fine.”

Amazon has not disclosed how many people use Prime Music and estimates vary widely. Using surveys, MusicWatch said that about 8.5 million people listen for at least one hour a month; some music executives who have dealt with Amazon put the number closer to three million or four million. (According to a recent estimate by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, the overall Amazon Prime program has 44 million subscribers in the United States.)

That is still well below the numbers for Spotify, which says it has 75 million users, including 20 million paid subscribers; and Apple, which has attracted 15 million users for its new Apple Music, 6.5 million of whom pay. Both cost $10 a month for a standard subscription.

Pandora has 78 million listeners, including 3.9 million who pay $5 a month for Pandora One, which eliminates advertising.

But analysts say that the growth of Amazon Prime Music since it began in June 2014 shows how quickly a major technology company can amass an audience large enough to challenge more established streaming services, especially when it bundles its music offerings with other services. Steve Boom, Amazon’s vice president for digital music, said that the company began to develop its strategy for streaming music as the wider market for downloads began to tumble several years ago. “As customers have been shifting toward streaming, we knew we would ultimately have to get there,” he said in an interview at Amazon’s headquarters.

The company — which by some estimates is still the biggest retailer of CDs and vinyl records — found that its customers wanted to be able to stream music without ads, to skip songs as they pleased and to save songs on mobile devices to listen to when they were offline. And most customers, Mr. Boom said, did not need that full catalog that Spotify offered. (This reflects Amazon’s broader strategy of emphasizing very low prices for its products to appeal to as wide a market as possible; the company recently began offering a Fire tablet for $50, for example.)

“We went for a bit more of a mainstream listener,” Mr. Boom said, “for whom access to everything at all times wasn’t necessarily the main thing.”

The resulting service is something of a cross between Pandora and Spotify. As an on-demand service, it lets users search for specific tracks to listen to, and is full of playlists and recommendations. But it also has radiolike feeds of songs organized by genre or artist.

While other streaming services have had their greatest success with younger-leaning genres like hip-hop and electronic dance music, Amazon emphasized middle-of-the-road pop, indie rock and children’s music.

“The sweet spot of Prime is really the young family,” Mr. Boom said, speaking near a conference room that was being used for a concert for Amazon employees and their children by the Pop Ups, a children’s music duo that released an exclusive album with Amazon in September.

Last year, the company commissioned a playlist of holiday music, “All Is Bright,” and this season it has doubled down on that strategy. Last month it released an exclusive album from Ms. Loeb, “Nursery Rhyme Parade,” and on Friday it will begin streaming songs from “Christmas in Tahoe,” an exclusive album from the pop-rock group Train.

Ms. Loeb — best known for her 1994 song “Stay (I Missed You),” and her signature cat-eye glasses — said that Amazon’s ability to market her music to other mothers was unrivaled.

“For me, as a mom, I know the power of Amazon,” Ms. Loeb said in an interview. “I go there multiple times a week, to buy diapers in the middle of the night or to pick up a birthday gift for a relative out of town. As a musician I am always interested in a new way to reach people who may be interested, and Amazon is in front of a lot of eyeballs every day.”

The arrival of Prime Music last year was not fully welcomed in the music industry, as some record labels complained that the company was offering too little in licensing fees. Universal Music Group, the biggest label, held out for more than a year, before announcing a deal in September. Neither company would comment on the deal, but two people with knowledge of the negotiations said that Amazon eventually agreed to a higher royalty rate for Universal.

Artists and managers who have been involved in exclusive content deals with Amazon said that the company offered generous terms and did not interfere with the recording process. Esmé Patterson, a singer-songwriter whose song “If I” is on “Indie for the Holidays,” said the only thing she was worried about was her anti-consumerist message.

“I said in the song that buying things wasn’t the point of Christmas for me,” Ms. Patterson said. “I hoped that Amazon wouldn’t be upset about that.” There was no objection, she said.

Mr. Boom said that, despite the new collections, Amazon was not interested in acting as a record label in the same way that it had become a television studio, with coming shows like “The Man in the High Castle” and a series written and directed by Woody Allen. But he said that the company would continue to experiment with music.

“There’s room in the market,” Mr. Boom said, “for different types of services.

Desperate to stop migrant influx, EU presses for deals with African nations

Forced into action by its biggest refugee crisis since World War II, the European Union is pressing some northern African nations to sign lopsided deals that would send thousands back without sufficient protection, African diplomats and migration experts are warning.

Concern is growing that the EU will use its considerable political and economic clout — including access to more than 1.8 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in aid — to buy off vulnerable countries on the sidelines of a two-day summit with African leaders starting Wednesday in Malta.

Still wary of Europe's colonial past, some Africans believe the EU is desperately trying to outsource its refugee challenges rather than accept that people will still try to come to the continent.

Ajay Bramdeo, ambassador to the EU for the 54-country African Union — which has not been invited to co-host the summit in Valletta — warned of "external pressure or influence brought to bear" by the 28-nation EU.

"These types of foreign policy interventions do not always deliver the desired results," he said in Brussels. The International Organization for Migration says more than 773,000 people have arrived by sea this year seeking sanctuary or jobs — many escaping war in Syria or Iraq — and the EU estimates three more million could come by 2017. Yet Turkey alone hosts more than two million refugees.

But while the EU recognizes the plight of refugees from war-torn Syria, the bloc believes most of those leaving Africa are looking for work and do not qualify for asylum, even if some are fleeing conflict, rights abuses or forced conscription. Its priority is to send those migrants back as quickly as possible. Experts fear the lure of aid, trade and other benefits is too enticing for poor African countries to refuse, and that human rights will suffer in the process as they sign the deals with the EU.

In an effort to stop people from traveling to Libya — a hotbed for human trafficking across the Mediterranean — the EU is using what migration officials describe as divide-and-conquer tactics to make individual deals with countries like Morocco, Tunisia and Niger.

"It's been a pattern in the past bilateral agreements. ... We saw that between Italy and Libya until the conflict broke out. We see it with Spain and Morocco," said the acting director of Amnesty International's EU office, Irvena McGowan. "They are completely done in secret. There's no transparency, there's no access to these documents. More often than not, there are no human rights or procedural safeguards at all."

In fact, the EU has criticized the United States for doing the exact same thing — deals with individual EU nations rather than the full trade bloc on issues like data protection.

Yet Europe's political desperation is real. Asylum-seekers have overwhelmed border authorities and reception facilities. Razor-wire fences have been erected and security tightened, threatening to undermine Europe's wide passport free travel area. EU nations have been painfully slow to react, and anti-immigrant parties have taken advantage of the leadership vacuum.

"A lot has been said," noted Pierre Vimont, the EU ambassador preparing the summit. "Not much has happened. We have to put it all into action now." Fearing for the future of the European Union itself, officials are scurrying for quick-fix solutions to stem the tide as countries take unilateral measures in response to unpredictable refugee movements.

In a draft plan drawn up for the summit, seen by The Associated Press, the leaders commit to help African countries readmit people who are refused entry. Officials from at least 10 countries will visit the EU early next year to "verify and identify nationalities of irregular migrants who are not in need of international protection."

Some still fear that detention camps might be built to house returnees. "If there is no clarity ... we're going to end up with open sky prisons, where the human rights of those interned are going to be violated," warned Bramdeo.

Niger — a main transit country along the African migration route to Libya — is already working closely with the EU on border security. European liaison officers are there helping to dissuade people from heading to Europe to look for jobs.

Yet migration experts say these deals have never worked in the past and undermine the cooperation and partnership both between the EU and the AU and also between African nations themselves.

"These solutions are not durable. Even the countries that they make deals with, these deals will not work because they won't enforce them," said Gibril Faal, head of the Africa-Europe Development Platform.

"If you have an agreement with a country, where it's influenced by finances and so on, then it's very likely that you will get into some dubious process of forcing people," he said.

The EU's executive Commission has already earmarked 1.8 billion euros ($1.9 billion) for an Africa trust fund on migration management. It's called on EU nations to match that figure with individual contributions.

But the fear remains that human rights are being rolled back as the aid, preferential tariffs and other sweeteners are being rolled out. Similar concerns surfaced over the EU's recent offers to Turkey to get it to toughen border security even as human rights and media freedoms in the country are being curbed.

These deals "are normalizing violations of human rights," warned McGowan of Amnesty International. "You're creating an atmosphere where human rights are on a sliding scale."

Google and American Heart Association team up on new research

A company whose name is synonymous with eyeballs on the Internet is turning its attention to hearts. Google Life Sciences, a research group recently spun off from its parent corporation, is teaming with the American Heart Association in a $50 million project to find new ways to fight heart disease.
The heart association’s half, $25 million over five years, is the largest single research investment in its history. For the Google group, its latest biomedical venture will join projects that include whiz-bang devices such as driverless cars, contact lenses that monitor blood-sugar for diabetics and health-tracking wristbands.

The project was announced Sunday at a heart association conference in Orlando. Heart disease is the world’s top killer, a problem that “seems ripe for new innovation” and disruptive, unconventional thinking, said Andy Conrad, Google Life Sciences’ chief executive. Progress has been slow and “we should shake it up a little bit,” he said.

Besides cash, Google has tech tools to offer such as sensors to monitor the health of “people in the wild” versus just when they go to doctors and huge capabilities for data analysis. The company is aiming for a cure, Conrad said. There’s no guarantee of success, but “the only thing we can promise is that we’ll try harder.” By early next year — Valentine’s Day, “a big heart day,” Conrad said — a team from Google and the heart association hope to pick a project leader, who might be a cardiologist, a nurse or “a teenager from Wisconsin,” depending on what skills and ideas that person can bring to the table. The team is looking for “a maverick,” he said.

The venture “really allows us to think about … doing research in a different way,” said Dr. Robert Harrington, chairman of the Stanford University School of Medicine and a member of the heart association’s board.

Traditional research has brought only incremental improvements in heart disease treatment.

“We are trying to do something disruptive here,” Harrington said.

Myanmar: Citizens celebrate likely victory of Suu Kyi’s party

YANGON, Myanmar – Voices rang out in unison Monday, as hundreds of jubilant people gathered outside the opposition party headquarters where images of Aung San Suu Kyi were being shown on large-screen TVs. Results from Myanmar’s historic election were still not final, but opposition leaders were convinced of success and their supporters were celebrating. “She’s the people’s leader who the whole world knows,” the crowds sang. “Write your own history in your hearts for our future so the dictatorship will end. Go, go, go away dictatorship.”

From street vendors to intellectuals to former political prisoners who suffered torture and imprisonment, pro-democracy supporterswere jubilant at the idea of a Suu Kyi victory, and the weakening of a military-backed regime in a country where iron-fisted generals have held sway for half a century.

Even some pro-government voters hailed Sunday’s general election, if only in hopes that a new government would bring improvement to their lives in one of the world’s most impoverished nations. Celebrations were occurring across the country, but enthusiasm probably ran highest around the headquarters of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in Yangon, where her spokesmen said the party was headed for a landslide victory. Final official results are not expected until Tuesday at the earliest.

Even some foreign tourists got caught up in the atmosphere, posing for photographs after donning T-shirts and headbands with the NLD’s “fighting peacock” logo.

“I think Mother Suu will win. She must win,” said Thet Paing Oo, a 24-year-old fruit seller, referring to the leader with an affectionate term that many people here use. “There will be more freedom in our country if the NLD wins. Our country will be better. Our lives will be better.”

While not without problems, the election appeared to have passed generally freely.

“This election has given the people an opportunity to voice their will, and the groundswell of people’s support provides some sense of solace for the people who have suffered and made sacrifices for the past 30 years,” said Ko Ko Gyi, a former student leader and one of thousands of people imprisoned during the military’s rule.

Journalists and monitors were even given access to voting on a vast military base in Naypyitaw, the capital city that is home to most military leaders and top civil servants. Even in Naypyitaw, some supporters of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party said they hoped the election would bring change and a better future.

A soldier’s wife, 31-year-old Lu Ti, said she liked both current President Thein Sein and Suu Kyi, who was “also good in her own way.”

Political analyst Yan Myo Thein said he was “very happy with the election outcome,” adding that he now hoped for a smooth transfer of power. The junta annulled the results after Suu Kyi swept the polls in 1990.

The military relinquished formal power in 2011 when Thein Sein, who chairs the USDP, began some tentative reforms. But many in Myanmar view him as a puppet of the still-powerful generals.

Even with a commanding victory, the NLD will have its work cut out in Parliament, where 25 per cent of seats are reserved for the military. Suu Kyi herself cannot become president since a constitutional amendment bars anyone with a foreign spouse or husband from holding the position. Suu Kyi’s late husband was British, as are her two sons.

Suu Kyi has insisted, though, that the constitution will not keep her down if the NLD wins, saying she will “be above the president.”

UK music 'boosted by £500m investment'

The British music industry invested nearly £500m in new music in 2014, with the signing up of new artists by major labels up 30%, data has suggested.

The number of new acts signed by major labels last year hit a five-year high of 156, the figures said. 

They were supplied by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and Music Publishers Association (MPA).

It follows on from last week's news that the British music industry boosted the economy by £4.1bn last year.

'No fluke'

The 156 new artists signed by Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music was 26 more than in 2013, and just 12 fewer than the recent peak in 2009 of 164 new deals.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI and Brit Awards, said: "It's no fluke that 2014 was such an outstanding year for British music.

"Alongside the artists themselves, the passion and commitment labels show in unearthing, nurturing and developing the next wave of talent is one of the main reasons our music is the envy of the world right now."

Investment by record labels in artist and repertoire (A&R) development reached a record £178m, with labels spending a further £157m on marketing.

Singer-songwriters earned £162m from music publishers, which takes the total outlay for the industry to £497m. EU investment figures also revealed that the music sector invested more revenue (25%) in development than industries such as the biotech, pharmaceuticals and auto sectors.

Jane Dyball, the head of MPA Group, said: "These investment figures highlight why British music remains so successful on the global stage.

"Importantly, these incredible figures also highlight that music publishers, like record labels, make a very substantial annual investment in A&R, further demonstrating the music industry's colossal contribution to the financial and cultural wealth of the UK."

Figures released in June revealed that the huge success of performers including One Direction and Coldplay saw UK albums and singles generated about $2.75bn (£1.8bn) in sales last year.

Siri is getting better at handling Apple Music

You can play Apple Music on Apple TV, but Siri has no clue what’s going on. In the tvOS 9.1 beta, she’s smarter; you can ask Siri to play music from specific artists and Beats 1.

As you can see in the video below, Siri can handle some cursory searches like finding artists or firing up playlists you’ve created. You can also ask Siri to start playing music from specific artists, and start or stop Beats 1.Even though Apple has this functionality in beta form, it looks decent enough to ship at this point. Unless you get too tricky with Siri — it seems she can’t yet find specific tracks — it seems to work pretty well.

There’s no specific timeline for tvOS 9.1 to ship, so we can’t say when voice control of Apple Music (if Apple indeed includes it in that build) will arrive.