The Apple Beat: Taking a first spin at Apple Music

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Apple’s collected a vast amount of data through the years (as has Beats) on what music lovers like, there are powerful curation algorithms that ensure that there’s always something new or something surprising for each user each time they fire up the service.

Apple’s new Music Service ‘Apple Music’ kicked off yesterday and was made available to millions of iOS and Mac OS users via respective updates to iOS (8.4) and iTunes on OS X Yosemite. Apple Music is available now in 115 countries.

The service is Apple’s biggest play in music since it created the iPod a decade ago. Since then, iTunes has become the largest music seller in the world and practically changed the game for music distribution and the digital age.

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Apple gearing up for Beats 1 Radio debut

It may not be easy to get excited about a new radio station these days. But when it is the Apple-backed Beats 1 Radio component of the upcoming Apple Music service, we can expect a lot of interest.

Former BBC DJ, Zane Lowe, who makes up one third of the initial triumverate of DJs curating the sound of Beats1 (from NY, LA and London, you know, the epicentres of cool music), is hyping up his first on air interview. Lowe will be chatting up iconic rapper and known Dr. Dre cohort, Eminem, as his very first guest. How the world has changed. Eminem famously embarked on a lawsuit against iTunes back in 2009.

That case was eventually settled, and now Eminem is helping kick off Apple's biggest music play since it launched iTunes and the iPod over a decade ago.

In other Apple Music related news, Taylor Swift finally decided to allow her latest album 1989 on Apple's streaming music service after all. The pop star tweeted, "After the events of this week, I've decided to put 1989 on Apple Music...and happily so." Apple Music kicks off in the US on June 30.

The Apple Beat: An Overview of Apple Music

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

What a lot of people tend to overlook is that because of iTunes, Apple is actually the number one music retailer in the world. The service celebrated selling 25 billion songs back in 2013, and it took over a decade to build that business which now is expanding to Apple Music.

Apple’s big announcement at this year’s World Wide Developer’s Conference was its new music service aptly titled Apple Music. 

The company that invented iTunes as well as revolutionized buying songs and albums digitally and which really started the iPod revolution a decade ago, had to react to the sudden shift of users buying music to using streaming services like Pandora (not in Canada), Spotify, RDIO, Google Play Music and various others. Here's what you need to know about Apple Music.

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