Apple has been working on a streaming music service for some time, and until now the details have been anyone’s guess. While the company hasn’t confirmed anything yet, website 9 to 5 Mac, which is known for breaking stories relating to to the consumer electronics magnate, has published a piece with plenty of insights into what the upcoming service will look like, act like, and how it will work with everything iTunes users and Beats subscribers are already familiar with.
Meant primarily to compete with Spotify and Rdio, the as-yet untitled service will reportedly be announced in June, likely when the tech giant hosts its annual WWDC conference. Some have been assuming that Apple will rely solely on its new Beats brand to lead the charge, but now it appears that the firm is creating an entirely new program, choosing to incorporate bits and pieces of Beats under an Apple logo.
Music will be accessed on the platform in two different ways. First, it will use the extensive library that Beats has already curated. Before being purchased by Apple last year, the Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine-founded company had already put the leg work in, signing deals with most of the major labels and securing an enormous library of songs. The service will also pull from a user’s personal library, which can be stored in the cloud. A listener will be able to go back and forth between the two, which allows them almost any song. When it launches, users will be asked to combine their iTunes/Apple ID with their Beats account, should they already have one.
While plenty of the technology will come from Beats, the look and style of the service won’t take from Apple’s purchase. The company will ditch the red and black look in favor of something more in line with their clean, white branding. Though the name has not been revealed just yet, apparently Apple wants to keep the iTunes moniker around, perhaps anticipating a day when the revolutionary store it founded years ago is no longer needed.
Apple will hope to entice plenty of new users with an appealing price tag—one that its competitors can’t match. The service will apparently cost around $7.99, which is two dollars cheaper than Spotify’s Premium service. The company worked with Beats Music to try to get the monthly price to just $5, but after many negotiations, it looks like that isn’t going to happen.
Beats may disappear as a brand, but it will live on in everything the company creates related to music. Apple is hard at work on the creation of new versions of the Music app for iPhones, iPods, and iPads, all of which will integrate what Beats has already started. In addition, a new iTunes is coming, as is an app specifically crafted for Apple TV.
The report also states that Apple is having a rather hard time getting this project to the finish line. Apparently, Apple employees were upset that incoming Beats programmers were placed above them (in order to move the development of the new streaming site along), and it lead to an unhealthy working environment. The company wanted to announce the service earlier in 2015, but it has come up against several delays.
