Why Apple Music needs an open API
It’s tough to compete against the world
The Short and Sweet
Let’s make this short and sweet. Apple Music has managed to hit 10 million subscribers in 6 months. That’s pretty impressive considering that it took Spotify about 6 years to hit that mark. Less impressive is the fact that Apple Music is installed automatically on every iPhone and that Apple already had just about everyone in the world’s credit cards already stored.
The Market
Ok, so we’ve established that Apple has a nice chunk of the paid streaming market and that they have the extreme advantage of owning the real estate of the iPhone home screen. Now let’s talk about who else is involved. Spotify, Deezer, Pandora, Soundcloud, Google Music, Rhapsody and, up until recently, Rdio were the major players. Tidal um… Anyway, aside from Pandora and Soundcloud, the rest of these services are 99% the same. They have the same catalogues, they have apps on all the main platforms and they’re priced at $9.99. We have to exclude Pandora because they have a relatively tiny catalogue (1.5M) and they don’t allow you to choose your music or create playlists. Soundcloud on the other hand gives you all the functionality of a streaming service minus most label-produced music. That’s going to change really soon but we’re not going to talk about that here.
Getting to it
Despite all of my rambling, now we can actually talk about why Apple must create an open API in order to continue growing. While Apple Music has done a great job of catch-up in terms of subscriber base, they’re going to have a much harder time hitting their next 10 million. Part of this is due to the number of people willing to pay for music being too small for so many companies to keep growing. The more important part is that Apple Music is average at best. Sure, they have their “human-curated playlists”, but that’s just marketing jargon, every streaming service has human curated playlists and they’ve been doing it for a lot longer than Apple. Aside from this, Apple Music has literally zero differentiating feature from the other services besides Beats 1 Radio. Yes, B1 Radio is actually pretty awesome but it’s free, it’s just an improved radio station and it’s not what the new generation of music junkies are looking for. What we really want is freedom. Freedom to choose our features and freedom to share our music. Yesterday, Spotify partnered with Genius for one of the coolest collaborations in music tech I’ve seen in a while. And, this isn’t the first time. Spotify has allowed developers to build all kinds of awesome features using the Spotify catalogue. Soundcloud has done similar things. They knew that Soundcloud was a bloggers dream and they made it incredibly easy to use their catalogue for all kinds of cool things. It just so happens that I’m building one myself. And there’s a reason that Spotify and Soundcloud let me do that. The more users I get, the more users they get. It’s an incredible win-win. As a developer and music junkie, I get to build my passion project using the enormous catalogues they have put together and in return they get lots of listneing data and larger subscriber bases. Apple OWNS their app store and yet they haven’t allowed the millions of people building for their platform to access the music service built into the phone. What’s worse is that all of the artists and fans aren’t getting the benefits of streaming when it’s locked into a closed system. It’s 2016 and Apple Music is nearly identical to an iPod. Oh yeah, I guess there is Apple Music Connect :/
Why It Works
Music is made to be shared. That may be the slogan for Laylo but it’s also a fact. Songs used to bring communities together. More recently it’s brought families, friends, couples and crowds together around a common appreciation. By keeping Apple Music in a closed ecosystem, Apple is making music listening a singular experience. Not only is that boring, but it also screws over the artists who want their music heard and the fans who want to talk about and share songs with their peers. Soundcloud was the perfect platform for independent artists because it allowed for easy uploads but it was also the perfect platform for bloggers because it gave them a simple way to share and comment on songs. Spotify took the reigns as the largest paid platform because it works with other apps and platforms and thus reaches a much larger audience.
What’s Going on Here?
There’s really only two possible explanations for what’s happening. The first and least plausible is that Apple doesn’t care about making an open API. They have built a monolith of a company on a closed platform and maybe they’ve decided the same should be done with their music service. The more likely explanation is that they wanted to grow the app and make sure it was ready for an open API. In this scenario, Apple got to build a userbase and knock out the kinks (and we all know there were kinks). Now they get to make a press-worthy announcement that they were kind enough to open up their music service to developers. They’ll probably come up with a great slogan for it too. I’m thinking “A music platform built for the world”. The worst part is just like “human-curated playlists”, a lot of people will probably think this was an Apple idea. Whatever their slogan might be, I’d like to end this article by saying FUCKIN DO IT! I’m incredibly excited to get Spotify and Soundcloud lovers sharing and discovering great new music on my app but I have 10 million possible friends who won’t be able to play along! Yet. So — Jimmy, Jony, Tim, whoever it is putting on the black turtleneck for the next Apple Music announcement, please keep the music fans like me in mind and break out the open API goodness.
Join Us
If you want to connect with your fans, are a superfan yourself or just dig what we’re doing, come join us. Artists can get access to their dashboard by heading to app.laylo.com and clicking Let’s Go!
