I don't get the sense there was one person driving Apple Music. More like you say, too many cooks in the kitchen. Or a product built off of a checklist from marketing.
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Beats 1 Lead Executive Ian Rogers Leaves Apple
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It's possibly health related. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ian pass out at Beats 1 Radio last night. I guess it's pretty serious.
31 Flavors > Beats 1
Steve Jobs was not a great CEO. He was a great sales person. When he had something to sell (iPod, iPhone) as CEO, it sold well because he sold why people needed it. When he had nothing to sell in his previous stint as CEO, he was regarded as a poor CEO (and subsequently dismissed).
Tim Cook on the other hand is actually a CEO who understands many, if not all, facets of his company and that translates into the stock prices. CEOs of publicly traded companies are judged on one thing, and one thing only: how valuable is your company? And Cook has been brilliant in that respect.
Guess I have to pile on about my disappointment with Apple Music. I thought iTunes Radio was a flop, and became less and less enamored with the iTunes store over the years. Consequently, Amazon Prime Music has been getting nearly all my purchases for the past few years. Much better designed and user-friendly---exactly what Apple should be doing. Apple Music lost me from Day One when it was announced at WWDC 2015; what a mess that presentation was. Iovine looked like a rambling fool, and not a single presenter made a compelling argument to subscribe to the music service. Since then, and despite having a 3-month free trial, I haven't used it once. Same for Beats 1. It's all a confusing, disorganized mess. Apple has lost its mojo here, and I am skeptical they'll get it back. Three billion wasted. My guess is Mr. Rogers hates working there, doesn't need the money, and realized he was a marked man. It'll be interesting to see how Tim Cook spins the Apple Music update on Sept. 9.
They are not going to get rid of Eddy Cue. They will simply toss money at Apple Music hoping to make it succeed. In this socio-political climate, having a Latino executive is worth more than almost any mistake he can make. Only way to get him out of Apple would be something very dramatic such as openly racist remarks, spousal abuse, etc.
Can we please not stoop that low. All that's missing is an obligatory remark about how Cook promotes diversity over quality.
Edit: I just saw the "Latino executive" bit, well done SteveJobs2.0.
I gave Beats 1 five chances or so. Every single time I heard either someone talking very very fast for a very very long time, or a song you couldn't pay me to listen to. People say "oh you should listen to this and that show". Great. But for me radio should be a form of background entertainment while I read something or work on a project. It shouldn't be a chore where I go through countless shows grinding my teeth because one of them might pick up my interest. I am very clearly not the demographic Beats 1 panders to. And that's fine, because Beats 1 is just another radio station.
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What? Beats 1 is just another radio station?
There, I said it. It is not revolutionary. It is not a game changer. It doesn't bring any new quality at all. People who think it's super exciting that you don't have to Shazam songs need to meet my brother, he has a magical device in his car (I believe it's called a "radio") that displays titles and performers of the songs played. People who think it's revolutionary that you can listen to previously aired shows need to check out the BBC website. You can even watch TV broadcasts on it!
As with most things Apple, Beats 1 was hyped as something magical and awesome. It isn't. It's a radio station that plays a lot of hip-hop and rap and some other stuff. What WOULD be revolutionary and amazing: if Apple started Beats 2-5 as well, and allowed you to treat them as building blocks. Suppose there is a show at 6pm on Beats 2, call it "Janet Jackson's Moist Hour" (JJ's fans will get the joke) that I want to listen to, and there's a show at 6pm on Beats 5 called "Weird Al Yankovic's Hits And Misses" that I also want to listen to. Now give me an app in which I can move the shows around, and they will play automagically in my Radio tab. (Obviously you can't move the show to a time before it actually airs.) I could create my own radio station that plays stuff I actually want to hear, rather than wait till 3am because that's when Elton John's Crocodile Hour plays. No Zane? Then check out Beats 2 where Alexis Petridis talks about his favourite albums. Then after two hours of that, skip automatically to Beats 4, where Danny Tenaglia plays 90s house. Etc. There would be a possibility I'd never leave my house again because there's so much amazing to listen to. The way Beats 1 is now it panders to very narrow demographic, a large part of whom never listen to the radio anyway. I know exactly one person below the age of 35 who listens to the radio, it's my workmate who is 32 and likes the News Radio to be on all the time.
Correct, I often see there there is an internal fight for the business purpose of Apple Music.
One side sees it as an on-line streaming service competing with the rest of the field while others see it as a loss leader for selling Apple hardware. From that, no unified vision.
I am sure the discussion over who would be the first artist played on Beats 1 was a conference room throw down worthy of an SNL skit.
This is what Apple totally missed with Beats 1. The era of the scheduled broadcast of pre-recorded media to mass audience is ending it's century long reign.
The proper model for streaming is similar to print media and not broadcast. That is have a series of releases out with the consumer scheduling their own time to take in the media. YouTube and NetFlix gets it.
In it's current form, Apple Music Beats 1 is some sort of mega-world-radio attempt that few are taking on.
A while back Ben Thompson wrote a piece over at Stratechery arguing Apple didn't need to offer a streaming music service. Rene Ritchie would tell you Apple is doing it because "music is in their DNA". Personally I would've been fine with the no frills streaming music service that works, like Google Play Music or Spotify. None of this Beats Radio or Connect nonsense. None of this "curation" BS. Just something simple with a simple UI that easily integrated with iTunes Mach and iTunes Radio. A service like that wouldn't have required spending $3 billion Beats.
Lots of young people listen to BBC Radio 1 here. I suspect the issue is that American radio in general is terrible and has no imagination. That was certainly my experience.
Beats 1 is good too - but if you don't like modern Radio 1 style music you won't enjoy it. Like Radio 1 it's a new music station.
Oh and if you heard someone talking very fast you'd have been listening to Zane Lowe. That's his style and he comes from BBC Radio 1. But he has a history of massive interviews with top artists.
Yeah and Steve sure had a hard time selling his NeXT wares. He had to have something worthwhile to sell and those worthwhile products didn't all emanate from his brain.
You wouldn't have got the exclusives and the massive artists Beats one has got without Beats.
I do agree that they should make the shows available on demand for paying customers.
If you really want to see what's happening. The current Apple is playing out like Shakespeare's King Lear.
Those I trust down Cupertino way whom walk the town and don't give a crap about the Loop politics said that Jobs original intention was to have an outsider move into the CEO position and not promote from within. Tim Cook and company nixed that and it resulted in the balkanization of Apple's resources.
When I first heard of the Beats acquisition, many of this crowd said this would be a cultural train wreck. Dre and company would not know what hit them as they are north of SLO. Guess those predictions were fulfilled.
The BBC would not exist if it wasn't for government subsidies and the BBC Trust. When commercial alternatives started to show (BSkyB, ITV, etc.) the BBC and their fellow cronies did every dirty trick in the book keep them from growing.
Despite their best efforts, the real ratings for the BBC has been in decline for the past 20 years. It got so bad, they ended of reviving television shows canceled decades ago (Dr. Who and such) in an attempt to get audience share back for their political messages.
Apple Music has a terrible user interface in my view. Other than occasional exclusive releases like Compton (a pile of garbage IMHO), there's no compelling reason to use it. Spotify is the same price and they have a much more intuitive and refined user experience. I hope Apple has a team working on an overhaul of the software. It wasn't ready for primetime at all.
Apple changed the hardware. They improved the sound quality. I'd guess the guy they hired out of the audio industry a couple years ago played a role. I wish I could remember his name.
I wouldn't be surprised if they break even on the purchase with hardware alone. Of course reading these forums I've learned that selling lots of product and making lots of money is flopping.
and there's this little nugget too, Android Wear support on iPhone?
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/28/9220161/huawei-watch-preorders-now-available
Yeah I'm sure he left because you in particular don't like the current most popular genres of music.
Which is why we'll see Beats 2, Beats 3, etc. And while I don't enjoy everything I hear on Beats 1, I am sincerely enjoying the exposure to things I wouldn't have heard otherwise, and learning about new music together with people across the whole world. Worldwide premieres and DJs' knowledge of music I don't know have made it an overall positive experience for me.
Radio 2 has the same reach as Radio 1. It's more diverse as it caters for people who look for music outside the current release schedule and an age range from mid-twenties up into their sixties or even seventies. Radio 1 may be popular with the under 30s, but demographically, Radio2's audience is mch larger....
Ah, hello Mr Murdoch, nice to see you here. Sky survives by having a large portion of the rights to live Football. ITV and the Beeb have happily co-existed for *decades* from the 50's onwards. ITV *used* to create excellent documentaries such as The World At War, World In Action, etc. Now, it survives through such "ground-breaking" work as the Jeremy Kyle show. The BBC? They make shows that are bought and watched around the world such as Big Blue Live, Life On Earth, Sherlock, Doctor Who (a financial and critical *success*).