Nice, too bad outside of the US you have to remain subscribed to AM to keep the radio which is great.
Mind you I actually like Apple Music and am keeping it.
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What Happens When Apple Music Dies On September 30
- Thread starter boltjames
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Mind you I actually like Apple Music and am keeping it.
Here in the NL I can listen to Beats One (look at me spending the rest of my life listening to it religiously), the other Radio stations require subscriptions. I can view stuff on New but not play it. For You just suggests I subscribe.
That's actually all I need (and more). I can check if my own music is on AM and whether Apple split me into three artists again, and I can post on Connect. Wouldn't mind disabling just the For You and Radio tabs.
That's actually all I need (and more). I can check if my own music is on AM and whether Apple split me into three artists again, and I can post on Connect. Wouldn't mind disabling just the For You and Radio tabs.
I actually sort of experienced this. What happened was me and my mom separately started our individual Apple Music trials. Then a couple weeks later we started family sharing with each other. I'm guessing because of this my Apple Music didn't auto renew. I went to use it and it was asking me to renew. Once I did, it remembered EVERTHING including the original fav artist setup with the red bubbles. I didn't have to do anything for everything to reappear at all....all playlists intact..,everything. So I can at least confirm that in the SHORT TERM, yes indeed your artists and stuff you added with Apple Music will return after a brief lapse, anyway. Of course no one knows just how long Apple will allow your subscription to lapse and then resubscribe without loosing anything. That might be a good question for an Apple genius.
Thanks for the post
I'm not sure even they'd know - I'd like to think it was forever, but I'm not risking £9.99 to find out! It's showing up in my iTunes still, so I made a note of all the tracks I added for reference as a back-up plan.
To be honest, I'm considering buying CDs/vinyl and paying the £21.99/year for Match. That way, I own it all, with a physical copy for the car and pretentious culture shelf, but I can still stream it. I could then use desktop Spotify/YouTube to have extended previews.
i don't have a US credit card, and even after the usual 3 month trial, played 1 month subscription via store credit.
Thanks for the post
I'm not sure even they'd know - I'd like to think it was forever, but I'm not risking £9.99 to find out! It's showing up in my iTunes still, so I made a note of all the tracks I added for reference as a back-up plan.
To be honest, I'm considering buying CDs/vinyl and paying the £21.99/year for Match. That way, I own it all, with a physical copy for the car and pretentious culture shelf, but I can still stream it. I could then use desktop Spotify/YouTube to have extended previews.
I subscribe to iTunes Match as well.., and that subscription DID NOT lapse so I'm not sure if that had anything to do with my experience or not. I think your precautions are worthwhile and I would have done the same had I know before hand I would have to re subscribe. BTW I LOVE you referencing your collection to a "pretentious culture shelf" lol. Keeping it real! I love it!
You sir, win the Internet for the day, for keeping things real! Lol I love it! More people in this world need to own who they are.It's also where I keep my beard lotion and Fairtrade pumpkin seed snack-boxes
Those who are an auto-renew and are comfortable in paying $120 a year for the service saw no change on September 30.
If you didn't want to go past the free trial period you need to go into settings and turn off auto-renew as you were just charged for the month of October.
BJ
Yeah I know. It was just sarcastic post referring to thread title. Apple Music certainly didn't die on 30th of September.
It did for me. And if you read this article, looks like it's on its deathbed for practically everyone else.
http://www.technobuffalo.com/2015/1...ns-plummeting-as-free-trials-end-report-says/
And the only thing I lost of value when I terminated Apple Music life support was "For You" which was nothing more than a different name for "iTunes Radio Custom Stations" which are free. And without the extra tab, the app is actually easier to use for my Library which is a nice bonus.
BJ
Actually, I think the answer actually was September 30.
There are 800 Million iTunes Accounts
There were 11 Million Apple Music subscribers during the free trial
There are 3 Million Apple Music subscribers sticking with it
I had to double-check the math to make sure I wasn't getting it wrong, but that's 0.3%.
RIP
BJ
Ooh is that correct? I haven't seen that data (3 million sticking with it bit). If that's correct, it's shockingly bad.
So long as music is free, it's sort of hard to get people to pay for it.
Especially today where Pandora and iTunes Radio have taken the focus off of artists and onto singles and genres. Used to be I couldn't wait for the new Radiohead LP to drop, now I can just put on the New Alternative channel or build a custom channel around "Fake Plastic Trees" and get my fill of new tunes, the 15 seconds of commercials every hour is not a bother at all. My kids get their music from YouTube or social media like Twitter and Instagram.
It's a strange business model- give something away for free and make people want to keep it so much that they pay for it. I'm not saying its right, but it's what it is so until the record companies and artists decide to shut off the spigot they're going to see low single digit subscriber bases. For all intents and purposes, Apple Music is for hardcore types who would want to purchase at least $120 worth of music each year, the iTunes average is a $12 annual spend. Most iTunes customers purchase a single new album each year, stream iTunes Radio genres (or Pandora or iHeart) the rest of the time. Free iTunes Radio is perfect for that.
BJ
I think the problem with subscription-based model is that everybody got onto it too late. Newspapers and magazines folded while trying to get people to pay for articles. The idea that "it's free for x weeks, then you have to pay" only works if you have a single subscription to everything and there's nothing to move to. If I wanted to, I could start another Apple Music trial from my boyfriend's iTunes account. Then another one, because I have two credit cards. I don't, because my treasured €4.99 Spotify subscription offers me all that I need. Today Enya released a new single. Clickety click: it's on my "Ray's chart" playlist. Ten minutes later I'm listening to New Order's Music Complete from Spotify, then when I get bored I move to Janet Jackson's Unbreakable – on Spotify, then when I get bored I move to Discover Weekly, etc. I do not see myself as average music consumer and I definitely get my money's worth from Spotify. (Oh by the way, just found John Grant's new album on Spotify. Back in a sec.)
I honestly thought, though, that Apple Music is going to be an overwhelming success. As Apple Watch came and swept the entire smartwatch market off its feet (as small as that market is), I expected AM to do the same with streaming services. Before the launch, if you asked me to predict how many paying customers will there be after trial is finished, I'd hazard a guess around THIRTY, not three million. But that was before me (and half of the world) discovered how buggy, unreliable and crippled Apple Music actually is as a service. The promised Android app and 100k limit for iCloud is nowhere to be found. This alone costs Apple millions of subscribers. But the most important bit is that out of 800 million iTunes accounts mere 11 million people bothered to check out the FREE trial. I'm sure that articles like that Jim Dalrymple one had a lot to do with it. But obviously there is a huge, huge amount of people who either already use a streaming service and are happy with it, or just don't want one.
Apple had one unique feature that nobody offered so far (as far as I know): integration of the streaming component with offline downloaded music. It really irks me that Spotify phone app has no access to the music on my microSD card, and Poweramp has no access to Spotify music. I'm not going to switch between the two. Apple Music was supposed to take my existing library, enrich it with AM downloads and allow me to freely create playlists containing both AM music and my local files. We all know how well that went. And by the looks of things, Jim Dalrymple was right when he said that nobody at Apple has a clue how to fix all the errors. Which is why I think that Apple Music will follow Newton and Ping sooner or later. Unless, of course, completely fixed iTunes 13 comes out VERY SOON – and comes with another free three month trial.
I honestly thought, though, that Apple Music is going to be an overwhelming success. As Apple Watch came and swept the entire smartwatch market off its feet (as small as that market is), I expected AM to do the same with streaming services. Before the launch, if you asked me to predict how many paying customers will there be after trial is finished, I'd hazard a guess around THIRTY, not three million. But that was before me (and half of the world) discovered how buggy, unreliable and crippled Apple Music actually is as a service. The promised Android app and 100k limit for iCloud is nowhere to be found. This alone costs Apple millions of subscribers. But the most important bit is that out of 800 million iTunes accounts mere 11 million people bothered to check out the FREE trial. I'm sure that articles like that Jim Dalrymple one had a lot to do with it. But obviously there is a huge, huge amount of people who either already use a streaming service and are happy with it, or just don't want one.
Apple had one unique feature that nobody offered so far (as far as I know): integration of the streaming component with offline downloaded music. It really irks me that Spotify phone app has no access to the music on my microSD card, and Poweramp has no access to Spotify music. I'm not going to switch between the two. Apple Music was supposed to take my existing library, enrich it with AM downloads and allow me to freely create playlists containing both AM music and my local files. We all know how well that went. And by the looks of things, Jim Dalrymple was right when he said that nobody at Apple has a clue how to fix all the errors. Which is why I think that Apple Music will follow Newton and Ping sooner or later. Unless, of course, completely fixed iTunes 13 comes out VERY SOON – and comes with another free three month trial.
Yup, my point was that thanks to no Android app, no 100k limit and no fix to iTunes they have more or less lost millions of potential customers who, like me, will NOT pay €9.99 to find out whether the errors REALLY got fixed, and the only way to draw those people is offer them another free trial.
Do you have a source for this? I’ve heard rumours, but nothing concrete.
I don’t think the subscription is the problem. Some people here (on MacRumors) seem to assume that the music streaming market has a problem that needs fixing. But Spotify is actually a highly regarded service in itself, even though most users never subscribe. When you install Spotify on your Mac or your iPhone you will quickly realise why that is.
- The interface is simple and easy to manage. Compare Spotify with how iTunes used to look and you will see that Spotify has copied what were the better parts of iTunes before they messed it all up.
- The app also responds very fast and almost never seems to load very long, whereas with Apple Music the UI just feels chewy. Then consider that Spotify is pretty much just a wrapped website in a Cocoa app, whereas iTunes is predominantly a Cocoa app with baked-in web components. This is one of the few areas where a website just crushes the performance of a native app. I’ve observed the poor performance of Apple’s store infrastructure before, have you never wondered why the iTunes Store or the App Store is a bit slow when compared to websites in your browser?
- Spotify lets you share playlists easily and make them available to everyone. This is a huge deal when you are searching for music yourself, because the number of playlists is almost endless. Apple Music lets you search for curated playlists only and although you can share particular playlists with friends, you need to use an external facility for this (e.g. Messages). You can’t subscribe to friends or anything or share playlists within iTunes.
Excellent post. Perfectly on point.
The only things I'd add are:
1. New music just isn't that good and isn't that unique that people need to own it in a Library as much as they used to. During my lifetime, Rock was being nurtured, the Beatles had just invaded, Disco hit, Metal hit, Alternative was invented, Techno, Rap, dozens of other styles that simply didn't exist back in 1965 were coming out twice a decade, was really exciting. Today, nothing new. Just iterations of what's out there. There isn't a new Radiohead; just derivatives.
2. Even if one adored today's music and wanted to consume it aggressively, $120 a year for the rest of your life is a very hard concept for one to swallow. I bought "Paranoid Android" for $1 in 2002, I can't comprehend my son having to spend $1 per year for "I Can't Feel My Face". No one else can justify it either.
3. There's something wrong with paying for content that you haven't experienced, that rewards media companies for delivering crap. Apple Music subscriptions are like HBO. When they're pumping out The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire you feel like you're getting your money's worth. But in months and years where there isn't good new programming and all the movies are tired, what exactly are you paying for? I don't want to pay Apple Music $10 in a month where no music is compelling enough to take offline. That's why the pay-$1-per-song model works so well.
In the end Apple Music is like the Columbia Record Club and Cable TV combined, it's the worst of both industries. Pay in advance even if we deliver lousy music. Check. Pay us perpetually for reruns. Check. No thanks.
BJ