As Apple Music’s first day approaches, we’re learning a bit more about the details of the launch, and of the service itself. Eddy Cue even took to Twitter on Sunday to answer individual questions, and reveal an iTunes Match-like feature of Apple Music, for uploading songs that you own that aren’t already available to stream.
As MacRumors reports, Apple Music Senior Director Ian Rogers wrote on his blog that Apple Music and the required iOS 8.4 update will become available starting at 8 a.m. Pacific time Tuesday, with Beats 1 programming beginning an hour later. Rogers later edited his post to remove any mention of a launch time, but he also mentioned an 8 a.m. start time in a Tweet from Saturday.
@maurocorvino Update your phone at 8am. Zane’s show starts at 9am PT.
— ian c rogers (@iancr)
June 28, 2015All told, it’s probably safe to assume that Apple’s goal is to begin programming at that time, though whether it actually does may depend on whether it runs into any technical difficulties as if flips the proverbial switch.
Matchy matchy
But launch details aren’t the only thing we’ve learned this weekend—Apple Music is getting an iTunes Match-like song-matching service, and both that and the existing iTunes Match should also get a nice upgrade in the not-too-distant future. In an exchange on Twitter, Apple executive Eddy Cue says that Apple Music’s matching service will start with a limit of 25,000 matched songs, but that the company is “working to get to 100k for iOS 9.”
@karlfranks
@robmsimoes 25k for launch and working to get to 100k for iOS 9
— Eddy Cue (@cue)
June 27, 2015This means if you have music in your iTunes library that isn’t available in Apple Music, you’ll be able to upload it to your account and then stream it (or redownload it) to any of your devices. Customers who aren’t interested in Apple Music’s streaming catalog could keep paying $25 per year for iTunes Match, but if you already get iTunes Match but you’d also like to join Apple Music, it seems that you can drop the iTunes Match subscription and still be able to upload 25,000 of your own songs.
@robmsimoes same basic features of uploading the tracks in your lib we don’t have is part of Apple Music
— Eddy Cue (@cue)
June 26, 2015A larger upload limit will be a welcome change too. Google Play Music, for example, lets you upload 50,000 tracks. We’ll confirm how it works—for example, do you have to re-upload your collection?—when Apple Music launches on Tuesday.
@lokithorrrrr a new iOS 9 seed will support Apple Music
— Eddy Cue (@cue)
June 27, 2015Cue also confirmed that current Beats Music subscribers would be able to transfer their accounts to Apple Music, via an updated Beats Music app. And he told another Twitter user that developers running betas of iOS 9 would be able to use Apple Music once they installed a new, forthcoming seed.
Author: Nick Mediati
Nick is a freelance contributor and a former editor for TechHive and PCWorld. He likes puns and the color yellow.