Eddy Cue Talks Apple Music Subscriptions as Initial Three-Month Free Trials End

[TXCherokee]

I know a ton of people that tried the 3 month trial. Not a single one of them liked it, and not a single one of them is going to abandon Spotify for this. Perhaps Eddy isn't the right person to be handling services. He can't ever seem to get it right.

Now you know a single one. I'm keeping it. And as a family plan too.

 

[KALLT]

Did they ask why the Apple Music is significantly more expensive here in UK than in US?

It's £9.99 in UK, $9.99 in US, €9.99 (or even as low as €5.99 in many EU countries). Given by FX it is more than twice as much expensive in UK.

They must hate UK users.

I heard that it’s the same price across similar services, notably Spotify. It’s dependent upon the negotiations Apple made with the licensors, they don’t set the price unilaterally.

 

[Fuchal]

My wife and I are keeping our subscription. We both love it. There's nothing better to meld your personal and streaming libraries together.

 

[KALLT]

Agreed. I was just on a limited wifi plan while on a cruise and the iPhone just gobbled data up. It would have been nice to allow iMessage & Gmail to work, but other functions to turn off and not allow wifi usage. It was very frustrating. I am not sure if Android offers this or not. Apple does limit apps to cellular roaming but I like your idea of also allowing limits on the data amounts used too. It's a good idea!

Android does allow you to impose an overall data limit, not sure about the other things. The thing is, these solutions are not difficult to implement. Apple is already able to restrict mobile data usage per app and recording your mobile data usage, so it should be trivial for them to tweak that behaviour when the device is roaming or disable mobile data once the phone detects that the limit is reached. Super easy solutions and yet 9 years of iPhone has not brought us a step closer. The core problem of roaming is not so much that data is more expensive, but that the phone pretends that you have unlimited data at your disposal and is more than happy to burn through that. The only workaround so far is: restrict mobile data per app and turn off background app refresh before you’re travelling. This works for trips but not for cross-border commuters (which is a lot more common in Europe).

 

[darcyf]

clearly Apple is working on some form of cell service. There is no way that Eddie cares about a bit of roaming charges. First of all I am sure Apple pays for his phone and second he is super rich anyway so it would be nothing to him. Apples message is generally very well rehearsed so I am guessing that this wasn't as off hand as it seemed

Yeah if anything I'd say the aim was to make a publicized dig at all those "people" aka telecoms Apple is trying to convince in order to get the media talking. As much as everyone hates roaming charges (I had to go wifi-only on a recent trip to the US and it was painful) there isn't much in the way of publicity circulating around the idea of doing anything about it.

Apple have tried playing nice with these thugs and it got them nowhere. Consider this shots fired.

 

[Marshall73]

Did they ask why the Apple Music is significantly more expensive here in UK than in US?

It's £9.99 in UK, $9.99 in US, €9.99 (or even as low as €5.99 in many EU countries). Given by FX it is more than twice as much expensive in UK.

They must hate UK users.

$9.99 = £6.59 plus VAT at 20% is £7.91 so they probably added on a bit to cover rate fluctuations and UK record deals.

 

[Eduardo1971]

I'm keeping Apple Music.
It's my first streaming service, so I have nothing else to compare it to. Massive amount of music that I would otherwise have to actually buy. I also have four other family members on the plan so its very economical.

I expect the service to evolve-they should have called it 'Apple Music beta' to really lower expectations during these past few months.

 

[npmacuser5]

The reasons I am not moving forward is Apple Music is only Apple at this time. I agree with the other less then positive interface and other issues. I have speaker systems that are not Apple centric, other music offerings work nicely on all my devices. May take another look if they open up the Apple Music to more systems.

 

[HenryDJP]

Hasn't been working on AT&T LTE, so no thank you.

Maybe it's AT&T LTE not working. Just sayin'.

 

[B2k1977]

Just bought Spotify Premium. Tried the free service for a while. Paid for the whole year up front. I love it. Spotify integrates with my PS4 console, Apple music does not!

 

[John.B]

Eddy Cue, your Music app in iOS 9.0.2 is a hot mess.

My Apple Music subscription ended last night as expected, but since that time, any songs I bought from iTunes during the three month trial period won't play on my iPhone, I get an error that says "iTunes Match Required" and "This item cannot be downloaded because you are not subscribed to iTunes Match".

What hasn't helped:
Connecting my iPhone to my Mac and turning off/on Sync Music (remove/re-add all music from iTunes on my Mac).
Turning off Sync Music (i.e. removing all music from my iPhone) then playing tracks from the "Purchased" playlist.
Turning off Sync Music (i.e. removing all music from my iPhone) then trying to re-download from the iTunes Store app.

It makes no difference what the "Only Offline Music" toggle is set to.

Songs bought from iTunes before my Apple Music subscription sync/play/download normally.

 

[JakeK]

From a European standpoint I do not see the roaming charges as a problem. It might be an Apple related problem to not being able to negotiate a deal with the carriers.

For example: I pay $15/month for unlimited data(10 Gig cap)/calls in Germany + 1 Gig of additional data outside of Germany within Europe or the United States/Canada + unlimited calling (10 cents a call) in Europe and the US/Canada.

 

[sofila]

I really don't understand people freaking out about the UI.

I think they could simplify a bit, but I haven't had any problems.

I couldn't agree more. I have had no issues at all. In fact, I question people who say it is "incredibly hard" to find music or an album. A baby could do that on Apple Music. And if you like a song, you tell siri to play more of that and she'll bring up the whole album.

Every group of people has inside a sub-group of smarter dudes. You two are clearly part of the latter.

 

[Datalinks]

They need to sort out this iCloud library/music match because its messing up large music libraries big time. I turned it off on my main computer..

 

[malexandria]

It's fugly, for starters. (iTunes desktop) Things are very hard to find most of the time. Sometimes when you do find stuff, you still can't play it, even though it appears to be in their library. (Do a search in AM for "Joe Jackson Heaven And Hell". Then try to click on the result offered.) Then there's the tiny text, columns you can't resize and loads of whitespace you can't do anything about.

I am surprised there seems to be no decent alternative to Mac iTunes. I looked around and the only that wasn't gross was Tomahawk, but Tomahawk is even stupider than the iCloud sync – it takes an album title and tries to guess what is on it, instead of displaying what ACTUALLY is on it. 1-track singles turn into 18-track albums without the actual song present. At least it doesn't butcher my library, but that's hardly a reason for me to use it.

As for decent alternatives to Apple Music itself, I am very happy I haven't cancelled my €4.99 subscription to Spotify because they removed the option and now you have to pay €9.99. But existing users continue paying €4.99 (at least until Spotify removes the option from us as well). In any case, Spotify beats AM in every aspect except for the fact I can't set up Spotify on my phone to play both streamed and local tracks, and having two separate players is a bit silly. AM would win here if not for the fact it destroys libraries and refuses to sync tracks for many, many people. (And that the Android app never materialised.)

Keep in mind I only had it for a day. But I couldn't even figure out HOW to search. I'd do a search and I didn't know if it was searching the iTunes Store, my Music Library or Apple Music. Most of the time the results showed up in iTunes and I couldn't figure out how to actually "stream/download" it. The songs just kept trying to force me to buy - even when I owned it.

 

[uwdude]

Did they ask why the Apple Music is significantly more expensive here in UK than in US?

It's £9.99 in UK, $9.99 in US, €9.99 (or even as low as €5.99 in many EU countries). Given by FX it is more than twice as much expensive in UK.

They must hate UK users.

Yes 10 pounds is a lot more than 10 dollars or 10 euros- I wonder if there's some kind of tax in the UK that includes?

 

[pcaleb]

The metadata is so awful, it's just exhausting and no fun to use. I'll pass.

 

[uncle.zed]

Before Apple Music I used WIMP (TIDAL) and spotify, to my own suprise I prefered WIMP over spotify. Now after 3 months with apple I will leave it.
I just got 3 months free trial of TIDAL (as former wimp user - not sure if anyone can get it, but really shuould try) And I think I'll stick with it.

I love the way the "like" (or "star") function is organized there. You can "star" an album, a song, an artis and playlist, and than its extremly easy to get around all of this likes (they keep them well organized in thouse 4 sections) - easy , fast etc..

whit apple You only could "ad to your music" and than look for it for ages.

but nice competition though!.

 

[Four oF NINE]

Why isn't there a firewall between a customer's own private music and this service? I can understand a read only capacity to inform musical suggestions, but why would it have .exe capacity? Makes no sense.

 

[bbeagle]

I canceled yesterday and went back to Spotify. Apple hasn't updated or fixed the UI since Music launched way back in the summer. You still can't even create a new playlist from a song or album page. Spotify also doesn't have the weird greyed out track issue.

You still can't create a new playlist from a song or album page? Yes you can. Always been able to. Click the 3 dots ... and there is 'add to playlist', select a new one. Or click the radio button to create a new radio station based on that album or song.

The 'weird grayed out track issue'? It's simply showing you songs that you can purchase on iTunes, but because the artist not allowing Apple Music to, you can't stream them. Same issue in Amazon Prime for non-Amazon Prime songs. Not an issue with Spotify, because it doesn't list songs you can't stream but can only buy.

Would it be better if Apple Music didn't show the song at all, like Spotify? And you'd see a list of album songs with a few missing you didn't know what they were?

 

[HenryDJP]

Looks like the consensus here for the moment is to not use it and save $ 10.
Spotify is FREE and has more diversified music than Apple.

Spotify is not FREE. Don't put out misinformation. It requires putting up with annoying ads and you can't just pick the song you want to hear and play it instantly anytime.

 

[8281]

I just canceled Spotify and won't be using this either. I'd rather own music and pay once than pay for the next however many years. Streaming music is awesome, but all the subscriptions really add up.

 

[Jamalien]

UI is still miles behind spotify's offering but still keeping Apple Music simply because of the slightly superior sound quality which is only marginal but is a big factor if you own a pair of expensive headphones. If it wasn't for this though, I'd go spotify all the way...

 

[Fzang]

Yes 10 pounds is a lot more than 10 dollars or 10 euros- I wonder if there's some kind of tax in the UK that includes?

Probably not. They just like rounded numbers. Maybe it's a psychological thing?

Did you know: all prices in China end in 8s and not 9s, because 8 is a lucky number.

 

[malexandria]

Every group of people has inside a sub-group of smarter dudes. You two are clearly part of the latter.

Boom! You win the thread