The big Apple Music disappointment

Like a lot of other web/tech nerds I’m disappointed by Apples entry into music streaming. (Make no mistake, the average user appreciates the no-third-party-solution. Die-hard Spotify fans will rightfully stay with the service, but the people who are introduced to music streaming right now will thankfully take the integrated offer.)

• I’m not so much disappointed by the — especially in Apples benchmark — horrible UX
• I’m not so much disappointed by the plethora of bugs that happen when you stuff a new service inside several old products that are meshed together in iTunes
• I’m not so much disappointed by the missed opportunity to use the playcount statistics that every iTunes user has accumulated over the years to generate recommendations like LastFM does it for a decade. I see what they are doing here, but I just don’t think curation can beat the algorithm in the long(tail) term.

These are all things Apple can fix or add in later iterations — what it can’t fix (and what saddens me the most) is the underlying business model & concept: Instead of Beats, buy a service like bandcamp and/or cdbaby. Let the artists sign up directly at your company and let them sell and stream their stuff without the intermediary, the labels. (After all, that’s what the internet enables us to do.) Just look at the income distribution in the music business and you instantly see why this could be a huge deal for artists.

A service like “Ping” or its reincarnation “Connect” is just the icing of the cake. At first it would only cater smaller indie artists. But I could imagine rebel heads like Taylor Swift will follow very shortly and perhaps exclusively on this new service. The wave is rolling.

Of course Labels wouldn’t be happy. Maybe they would even pull their stuff from iTunes. But Apple is the one company that has shown time and time again that it is willing to disrupt itself. They have the money, time (they’re already a late follower), and even more important: The loyal follower base to push it through.

Apple had the historic chance to revolutionize the music industry again (after the “I can buy music digitally via iTunes”-revolution), and they blew it.