How are they at listing the orchestra and conductor? Do they list the the same compositions by various orchestras and conductors?
Apple Music is very artist-centric. If you search for "Gasparini" you get a lot of hits on CDs that contain music by Gasparini, but they are all listed by artist, not composer. A lot of the CDs have just a few tracks (for inst. some arias from Gasparini operas), but they don't list the composer. So a CD that is listed may contain just one track by Gasparini and a lot of tracks by Händel or Vivaldi, but which track is composed by which composer is up to you to find out one way or another.
Apple Music is very artist-centric. If you search for "Gasparini" you get a lot of hits on CDs that contain music by Gasparini, but they are all listed by artist, not composer. A lot of the CDs have just a few tracks (for inst. some arias from Gasparini operas), but they don't list the composer. So a CD that is listed may contain just one track by Gasparini and a lot of tracks by Händel or Vivaldi, but which track is composed by which composer is up to you to find out one way or another.
1) Thanks for the reply.
2) That's too bad. I listen to classical but I am not sure I have a good ear for it so I've always wanted to try to listen to the same composition done by different orchestras and/or conductors over time to see if I can discern a difference; if I can, then see if I have a preference; and if have a preference, see who easily/quickly I can distinguish that orchestra from other compositions upon hearing them for the first time in a random order. I know I can always buy various albums and then conduct these tests on my own but I honestly don't want to go though all that trouble to set it up or the cost for a wide array of the same music.
This is a problem, in part, of Apple's own making. Being tight-lipped has been a huge part of its DNA, and not always for the better.
The problem with the type of response we've seen here is, the next time Apple does not say anything about a rumor concerning a product or a service, people will logically assume that the rumor was true. Either have the diiscipline to be totally tight-lipped, or say a lot (see, e.g., Google, Amazon).
Reminds me of the morons who claim Apple Watch sales are bad because Apple won't announce numbers.... Even though they clearly stated they wouldn't announce said numbers even BEFORE the product launched.
You can do that. I just searched for "Beethoven Symphony 5" and got 50+ hits. Among the hits I checked there was Kleiber, all 3 Karajan, Barenboim, Böhm, Abbado, Harnoncourt, Salonen, Krips, Gardiner, Mengelberg, Haitink, Furtwängler, Fricsay ... Probably at least 30+ diffferent recordings totally.
I hope AppleMusic does well because I want Apple succeed wherever they tread (being an AAPL stockholder). But for me personally I don't get it.
The cost is effectively double what I pay for my TV content each month (NetFlix). I dislike radio generally and I already have too much music that I do like for iTunes Match to be of use (their collection size limit is too low). I would be interested in the stuff they provide to artists to touch base with their fans (when bands are on tour etc) but no way I'm paying for it.
I had a 6 month trial of Spotify Pro through Virginmedia in the UK and only used it for 2 weeks. The music selection was poor and I could never find albums I wanted to listen to. In the end I went back to buying music from iTunes.
I signed up for the family Apple Music trial and use it daily now and love it. Not only does it provide great playlists I can also make my own playlists in seconds. It is also bringing up music from my own library which I have forgotten about or not listened to for a while and I have found a lot of new music that fits in with my tastes.
Also, every time I have been looking for a song it's in there, even obscure film soundtracks.
The only issue I have had so far is that occasionally some tracks do not download to my iPhone when selected to make for use offline. When I do this for a playlist or album I have to double check that all tracks were done and select the tracks it missed and do them again.
Before taking any of this data seriously, I would ask who commissioned the survey, what were the parameters, the sample size, the standard deviation, the margin of error and numerous other questions that would validate or invalidate MusicWatch's assertions. Most surveys by tech or tech related research firms don't stand up to scrutiny and draw conclusions not supported by the facts. In this case, without the parameters and other related information about the study, I am going to say it's worthless. And since we know Apple has not shared any data relating to this, I'm going say it's a level beyond worthless and a bit past BS.
You mean just like nearly any study that is presented in this field of topic?
But yes, you're absolutely correct. This is the same level of information as "a well-connected analyst pulled this out of his..." Actually, it can be considered worse, as graphs and charts and thingies look just so scientific. Oh, and percentages to the nth digit, of course.
Frankly it's a bit concerning that 21% of people turned down 3 months of free music...essentially $30 of a competitors product for free. I don't think that bodes well for the service.
I've had Spotify and Beats and Apple Music is worse than both. As a stock owner. I really hope they revamp the UI ASAP.
I didn't sign up. Reason mainly being the hiccups regarding music in the cloud that have been reported.
But then again, I don't feel like part of the main target group anyway as I don't see the value in having no content locally, and shell out 120 per year for the streaming. Maybe that might change in the future. Right now I won't sign up.
Part of the discrepancy might come from the survey looking at US users versus global users and potentially from tech savvy people.
I think for me the take away numbers here are Apple's own. 20% of 11 million switched off. 11 million out of 500 million Apple ID...
It is sad I think. Streaming music is about the passed, the back catalog of the world's music and about the labels trying to extract cents worth of value out of something that is basically regardless of the commercial-ethical argument, public domain.
So Apple is investing all this energy into basically nothing.
Providing a platform for the music yet to be made, the artists yet to be discovered and for them to engage fans, make money and tell their story.
That is what is worth investing in and worth doing the percentages on..
and in that department Apple is the big player along with Band Camp and Sound Cloud. Spotify and Google et al don't even play in that world with any care because they don't build new value.
I'm not sure the majority of users sees it like this. I feel a bit like iTunes vs Napster times when the iTMS managed to "convert" many of the "music is for free otherwise it shouldn't be on Napster and here are my 5 gigs of songs I downloaded over the weekend"-people. To them music is like a fast food item: readily available, but only some value for the moment. They don't care about the artist and back stories. Just about consuming easily.
Personally, I'd love a service that lets me discover upcoming and new artists and get more info about them in a convenient way. But just for this I find the price is too high to be worth it.
This is a problem, in part, of Apple's own making. Being tight-lipped has been a huge part of its DNA, and not always for the better.
The problem with the type of response we've seen here is, the next time Apple does not say anything about a rumor concerning a product or a service, people will logically assume that the rumor was true. Either have the diiscipline to be totally tight-lipped, or say a lot (see, e.g., Google, Amazon).
I disagree. The interpretation of Apple giving a statement or not, is entirely of people's own making.
Apple Music is very artist-centric. If you search for "Gasparini" you get a lot of hits on CDs that contain music by Gasparini, but they are all listed by artist, not composer. A lot of the CDs have just a few tracks (for inst. some arias from Gasparini operas), but they don't list the composer. So a CD that is listed may contain just one track by Gasparini and a lot of tracks by Händel or Vivaldi, but which track is composed by which composer is up to you to find out one way or another.
That last part bothers me on a very broad scale: databases and search.
Considering the amount of money that Apple has invested in music, you would "think" that they would have the most comprehensive and complete database on earth. If not... why not? Especially if they ever want to tackle Google's strength in search, wouldn't music be a darn good place to start?
Also, while Apple is pushing the "human curated" portion of Apple Music, it stands to reason that even the curator's may need to look up i.e. search for new previously undiscovered connections within Apple Music, such as composer, writer, lyrics, lead musician(s), etc. etc.
Question regarding APIs: are there any developers out there that know whether extensions will apply to Apple Music? It would be interesting to have eventually an extension to search (for example) Grace Note, that would then link within Apple Music.
Databases, data manipulation through smart algorithms and predictive yet fine-grained search, are still in their infancy IMHO. A company that controls the knowledge and knows how to monetize it is currently the bane of the Internet due to scraping private information to serve ads. Apple has the unique opportunity to make the competition's business model ever more worthless, by integrating fine-grained search to their value-added services like Apple Music, which is being used on their profit-making devices and throughout their eco-system.
Apple has been in music now for well over a decade and should have this advantage of knowledge already. If they "really" want to crack the television and video market as SJ alluded to, then they need to apply an all-encompassing "search and suggestion" across *platforms, channels, providers and local listings*, both from Apple as well as the individual. Databases will be at the center of that just as much as music is, but larger by 100.
The iTunes and App Store point to the fact that Apple has a lot of improvement ahead of them. It would be nice to hear that IBM is giving them a hand with this as well as their recent embrace of Foundation DB making this easier going forward (shout out to our buddy here [@]Dick Applebaum[/@]..:smokey: )
*_* - Edited to include the definition to me of "all-encompassing".
I don't know what to think of apple music. I want to like it, since I love apple...
Stop right there. You judgement shouldn't involve these thoughts. Try to detach yourself and look at it as objectively as you can. Forget what you want, tell us how you feel about the UI, about the recommendations, your frustrations.
Apple Music is very artist-centric. If you search for "Gasparini" you get a lot of hits on CDs that contain music by Gasparini, but they are all listed by artist, not composer. A lot of the CDs have just a few tracks (for inst. some arias from Gasparini operas), but they don't list the composer. So a CD that is listed may contain just one track by Gasparini and a lot of tracks by Händel or Vivaldi, but which track is composed by which composer is up to you to find out one way or another.
That last part bothers me on a very broad scale: databases and search.
Considering the amount of money that Apple has invested in music, you would "think" that they would have the most comprehensive and complete database on earth. If not... why not? Especially if they ever want to tackle Google's strength in search, wouldn't music be a darn good place to start?
Odd you should mention google. I used to make short videos of the grand kids soccer games and post them to the teams' websites. Usually this involved special effects (retiming, etc.) that highlighted a play -- often set to music. I would grab one of my iTunes songs for the music. After uploading a video, there would be a delay of minutes, where the music was analyzed for copyright. It was like a slow Shazam, but after 10 minutes or so, YT would correctly identify the song -- and either reject the video or conditionally approve it.
Here's one:
[VIDEO]
At some point, YT stopped checking the music track -- it appears that you can upload anything now. The point is that Google had/has the means to recognize a sound track and the ability to tie it to a specific recording -- and all that fans out from there.
Also, while Apple is pushing the "human curated" portion of Apple Music, it stands to reason that even the curator's may need to look up i.e. search for new previously undiscovered connections within Apple Music, such as composer, writer, lyrics, lead musician(s), etc. etc.
Question regarding APIs: are there any developers out there that know whether extensions will apply to Apple Music? It would be interesting to have eventually an extension to search (for example) Grace Note, that would then link within Apple Music.
Databases, data manipulation through smart algorithms and predictive yet fine-grained search, are still in their infancy IMHO. A company that controls the knowledge and knows how to monetize it is currently the bane of the Internet due to scraping private information to serve ads. Apple has the unique opportunity to make the competition's business model ever more worthless, by integrating fine-grained search to their value-added services like Apple Music, which is being used on their profit-making devices and throughout their eco-system.
Apple has been in music now for well over a decade and should have this advantage of knowledge already. If they "really" want to crack the television and video market as SJ alluded to, then they need to apply an all-encompassing "search and suggestion" across *platforms, channels, providers and local listings*, both from Apple as well as the individual. Databases will be at the center of that just as much as music is, but larger by 100.
The iTunes and App Store point to the fact that Apple has a lot of improvement ahead of them. It would be nice to hear that IBM is giving them a hand with this as well as their recent embrace of Foundation DB making this easier going forward (shout out to our buddy here [@]Dick Applebaum[/@]..:smokey: )
*_* - Edited to include the definition to me of "all-encompassing".
Agree with all of that! iTunes needs to be rethought and reimplemented.
I think that IBM assistance will mainly take the form of providing large, reliable cloud services -- rather than actually developing the solutions.
From all I can find out about it, FoundationDB can handle about any db needs you require and it can readily change as your needs change. It is distributed, performant and scales well. It can be hosted on servers from Amazon, Google, IBM (even Apple) ...
I strongly suspect that Apple has been migrating Apple iCloud services to FoundationDB -- and the periodic iCloud outages reflect the cutover from existing implementation to FoundationDB. Once migrated, an iCloud service can be distributed to any combination of Apple or 3rd-party servers.
I am a French IPhone user and Itunes customer so I should logically be interested in Apple Music. But I won't subscribe to this service, because I already have a Spotify Premium subscription "offered" by my mobile phone operator. The integration of Apple Music with Itunes is a real plus, but I won't pay for something that I have for "free".
Of course if in the future my operator stops this Spotify offer, then I will subscribe to Apple Music.
Regarding the other services included in Apple Music, I am not fond of Beats 1. Not my tastes. Connect is a good idea but it should be extended to Editors/Publishers, not only artists. For instance, I like classic music very much and I would be interested in reading news from Deutsche Grammophon and being able to interact with people from this company (and others of course). And with music critics also. It would be very interesting to have music critics comment the new releases and discuss with Apple Music users.
It's a drop in the bucket compared to the 789 million Apple account holders that aren't even interested in subscription music to the point that they won't even try it for 3 months for free.
Oh, they've got me interested alright, I'm just not able to justify $10-15mo right now. I'll definitely be an Apple Music subscriber eventually, just not this year, or probably even next year. The reason I haven't signed up is because I'm pretty sure I'd love it and then want to subscribe.
But I don't need to. I've got plenty of my own music that I love listening to and genius playlists are pretty great. As great as Apple Music? No, probably not, but until I can afford $15mo, good enough. I suspect there are a lot of people like me.
What Apple's statement makes clear, however, is that research reports drawing from customer surveys can at times be completely off target. Or at least inconsistent in interpreting gathered data. Only Apple knows how well Apple Music is fairing in a field full of strong competitors, though even it can't predict what subscription numbers will be like in September with any certainty.
I'll make it more clear, they are always completely wrong, it is a survey and by definition it is missing all the facts. Apple is the only one with all the facts they know exactly how many customers they have, no one else has the information. These survey companies have done this for a long time and most companies had to rely on them since they were disconnected from their customers and had no other way of knowing what was happening. This is why apple will be successful, they are directly connected to all their customers and knows what is happening and do not need to rely on 3rd parties.
I don't know about Apple Music, but when Google launched with 90 day Free Trial they also claimed about 70% of users who signed up were still using it. But as soon as the Trial was over (which for Apple Music is in October for most launch users), most had switched off auto renew. Which did not make Music Industry happy for long term easy money.
Then retention rates to Pay to Play service fell to under Spotify's retention rate. Although I continued to use Play Music All Access on my Android Tablet, PC and Chromecast. When Play Music hit Apple App Store, I then had All Access and Cloud Play Access on all of my devices for the original $7.99 rate. Still do to this day!!! ......and because my wife's phone is using my account it's basically a family plan Free!
Tempest in a teapot. Attitudinal surveys are notoriously inaccurate at predicting consumer behavior. Way too many unanswered questions about the survey methodology to give this any value.
The real test for Apple Music will come when the 3-month trials start expiring next month. Doesn't matter how a "user" is defined, since Apple provided no means to actually cancel the service (not the same thing as turning off the auto-renewal) prior to the end of the 3-month trial. The only measure that matters for a paid service is how many people actually choose to pay for the service. How many of those 11 million "users" will keep the service when actual money is involved?
IMO, 11 million subscribers might seem like a big number. But, that doesn't measure up well when compared to the size of iOS' overall user base, and considering how the persistently Apple promoted the service to iOS 8.4 users (40% of whom upgraded to version 8.4 within the first two weeks).
Strategically, it might have made business sense for Apple to forcibly shoehorn the DRM-enabled Apple Music together with DRM-free iTunes. But, as a user experience, it has failed long-time iTunes users. And so much of Apple's vaunted customer loyalty depends on that user experience. And what will happen to users' music libraries when the Apple Music trial period expires and they choose not to renew?
A lot of unknowns that surveys like this one don't address.
Comments
How are they at listing the orchestra and conductor? Do they list the the same compositions by various orchestras and conductors?
Apple Music is very artist-centric. If you search for "Gasparini" you get a lot of hits on CDs that contain music by Gasparini, but they are all listed by artist, not composer. A lot of the CDs have just a few tracks (for inst. some arias from Gasparini operas), but they don't list the composer. So a CD that is listed may contain just one track by Gasparini and a lot of tracks by Händel or Vivaldi, but which track is composed by which composer is up to you to find out one way or another.
1) Thanks for the reply.
2) That's too bad. I listen to classical but I am not sure I have a good ear for it so I've always wanted to try to listen to the same composition done by different orchestras and/or conductors over time to see if I can discern a difference; if I can, then see if I have a preference; and if have a preference, see who easily/quickly I can distinguish that orchestra from other compositions upon hearing them for the first time in a random order. I know I can always buy various albums and then conduct these tests on my own but I honestly don't want to go though all that trouble to set it up or the cost for a wide array of the same music.
This is a problem, in part, of Apple's own making. Being tight-lipped has been a huge part of its DNA, and not always for the better.
The problem with the type of response we've seen here is, the next time Apple does not say anything about a rumor concerning a product or a service, people will logically assume that the rumor was true. Either have the diiscipline to be totally tight-lipped, or say a lot (see, e.g., Google, Amazon).
Reminds me of the morons who claim Apple Watch sales are bad because Apple won't announce numbers.... Even though they clearly stated they wouldn't announce said numbers even BEFORE the product launched.
You can do that. I just searched for "Beethoven Symphony 5" and got 50+ hits. Among the hits I checked there was Kleiber, all 3 Karajan, Barenboim, Böhm, Abbado, Harnoncourt, Salonen, Krips, Gardiner, Mengelberg, Haitink, Furtwängler, Fricsay ... Probably at least 30+ diffferent recordings totally.
But for me personally I don't get it.
The cost is effectively double what I pay for my TV content each month (NetFlix).
I dislike radio generally and I already have too much music that I do like for iTunes Match to be of use (their collection size limit is too low).
I would be interested in the stuff they provide to artists to touch base with their fans (when bands are on tour etc) but no way I'm paying for it.
I signed up for the family Apple Music trial and use it daily now and love it. Not only does it provide great playlists I can also make my own playlists in seconds. It is also bringing up music from my own library which I have forgotten about or not listened to for a while and I have found a lot of new music that fits in with my tastes.
Also, every time I have been looking for a song it's in there, even obscure film soundtracks.
The only issue I have had so far is that occasionally some tracks do not download to my iPhone when selected to make for use offline. When I do this for a playlist or album I have to double check that all tracks were done and select the tracks it missed and do them again.
You mean just like nearly any study that is presented in this field of topic?
But yes, you're absolutely correct. This is the same level of information as "a well-connected analyst pulled this out of his..." Actually, it can be considered worse, as graphs and charts and thingies look just so scientific. Oh, and percentages to the nth digit, of course.
I didn't sign up. Reason mainly being the hiccups regarding music in the cloud that have been reported.
But then again, I don't feel like part of the main target group anyway as I don't see the value in having no content locally, and shell out 120 per year for the streaming. Maybe that might change in the future. Right now I won't sign up.
I'm not sure the majority of users sees it like this. I feel a bit like iTunes vs Napster times when the iTMS managed to "convert" many of the "music is for free otherwise it shouldn't be on Napster and here are my 5 gigs of songs I downloaded over the weekend"-people. To them music is like a fast food item: readily available, but only some value for the moment. They don't care about the artist and back stories. Just about consuming easily.
Personally, I'd love a service that lets me discover upcoming and new artists and get more info about them in a convenient way. But just for this I find the price is too high to be worth it.
I disagree. The interpretation of Apple giving a statement or not, is entirely of people's own making.
That last part bothers me on a very broad scale: databases and search.
Considering the amount of money that Apple has invested in music, you would "think" that they would have the most comprehensive and complete database on earth. If not... why not? Especially if they ever want to tackle Google's strength in search, wouldn't music be a darn good place to start?
Also, while Apple is pushing the "human curated" portion of Apple Music, it stands to reason that even the curator's may need to look up i.e. search for new previously undiscovered connections within Apple Music, such as composer, writer, lyrics, lead musician(s), etc. etc.
Question regarding APIs: are there any developers out there that know whether extensions will apply to Apple Music? It would be interesting to have eventually an extension to search (for example) Grace Note, that would then link within Apple Music.
Databases, data manipulation through smart algorithms and predictive yet fine-grained search, are still in their infancy IMHO. A company that controls the knowledge and knows how to monetize it is currently the bane of the Internet due to scraping private information to serve ads. Apple has the unique opportunity to make the competition's business model ever more worthless, by integrating fine-grained search to their value-added services like Apple Music, which is being used on their profit-making devices and throughout their eco-system.
Apple has been in music now for well over a decade and should have this advantage of knowledge already. If they "really" want to crack the television and video market as SJ alluded to, then they need to apply an all-encompassing "search and suggestion" across *platforms, channels, providers and local listings*, both from Apple as well as the individual. Databases will be at the center of that just as much as music is, but larger by 100.
The iTunes and App Store point to the fact that Apple has a lot of improvement ahead of them. It would be nice to hear that IBM is giving them a hand with this as well as their recent embrace of Foundation DB making this easier going forward (shout out to our buddy here [@]Dick Applebaum[/@]..:smokey: )
*_* - Edited to include the definition to me of "all-encompassing".
Where Apple Music will make the most sense and pay the most dividends... The CAR.
If you are thinking in terms of streaming music to a car - think again.
I don't know what to think of apple music. I want to like it, since I love apple...
Stop right there. You judgement shouldn't involve these thoughts. Try to detach yourself and look at it as objectively as you can. Forget what you want, tell us how you feel about the UI, about the recommendations, your frustrations.
Odd you should mention google. I used to make short videos of the grand kids soccer games and post them to the teams' websites. Usually this involved special effects (retiming, etc.) that highlighted a play -- often set to music. I would grab one of my iTunes songs for the music. After uploading a video, there would be a delay of minutes, where the music was analyzed for copyright. It was like a slow Shazam, but after 10 minutes or so, YT would correctly identify the song -- and either reject the video or conditionally approve it.
Here's one:
[VIDEO]
At some point, YT stopped checking the music track -- it appears that you can upload anything now. The point is that Google had/has the means to recognize a sound track and the ability to tie it to a specific recording -- and all that fans out from there.
Agree with all of that! iTunes needs to be rethought and reimplemented.
I think that IBM assistance will mainly take the form of providing large, reliable cloud services -- rather than actually developing the solutions.
From all I can find out about it, FoundationDB can handle about any db needs you require and it can readily change as your needs change. It is distributed, performant and scales well. It can be hosted on servers from Amazon, Google, IBM (even Apple) ...
I strongly suspect that Apple has been migrating Apple iCloud services to FoundationDB -- and the periodic iCloud outages reflect the cutover from existing implementation to FoundationDB. Once migrated, an iCloud service can be distributed to any combination of Apple or 3rd-party servers.
I am a French IPhone user and Itunes customer so I should logically be interested in Apple Music. But I won't subscribe to this service, because I already have a Spotify Premium subscription "offered" by my mobile phone operator. The integration of Apple Music with Itunes is a real plus, but I won't pay for something that I have for "free".
Of course if in the future my operator stops this Spotify offer, then I will subscribe to Apple Music.
Regarding the other services included in Apple Music, I am not fond of Beats 1. Not my tastes. Connect is a good idea but it should be extended to Editors/Publishers, not only artists. For instance, I like classic music very much and I would be interested in reading news from Deutsche Grammophon and being able to interact with people from this company (and others of course). And with music critics also. It would be very interesting to have music critics comment the new releases and discuss with Apple Music users.
Of course it is.
That's exactly consistent with what I am saying, so it's not clear to me why you're disagreeing.
It's a drop in the bucket compared to the 789 million Apple account holders that aren't even interested in subscription music to the point that they won't even try it for 3 months for free.
Oh, they've got me interested alright, I'm just not able to justify $10-15mo right now. I'll definitely be an Apple Music subscriber eventually, just not this year, or probably even next year. The reason I haven't signed up is because I'm pretty sure I'd love it and then want to subscribe.
But I don't need to. I've got plenty of my own music that I love listening to and genius playlists are pretty great. As great as Apple Music? No, probably not, but until I can afford $15mo, good enough. I suspect there are a lot of people like me.
What Apple's statement makes clear, however, is that research reports drawing from customer surveys can at times be completely off target. Or at least inconsistent in interpreting gathered data. Only Apple knows how well Apple Music is fairing in a field full of strong competitors, though even it can't predict what subscription numbers will be like in September with any certainty.
I'll make it more clear, they are always completely wrong, it is a survey and by definition it is missing all the facts. Apple is the only one with all the facts they know exactly how many customers they have, no one else has the information. These survey companies have done this for a long time and most companies had to rely on them since they were disconnected from their customers and had no other way of knowing what was happening. This is why apple will be successful, they are directly connected to all their customers and knows what is happening and do not need to rely on 3rd parties.
I don't know about Apple Music, but when Google launched with 90 day Free Trial they also claimed about 70% of users who signed up were still using it. But as soon as the Trial was over (which for Apple Music is in October for most launch users), most had switched off auto renew. Which did not make Music Industry happy for long term easy money.
Then retention rates to Pay to Play service fell to under Spotify's retention rate. Although I continued to use Play Music All Access on my Android Tablet, PC and Chromecast. When Play Music hit Apple App Store, I then had All Access and Cloud Play Access on all of my devices for the original $7.99 rate. Still do to this day!!! ......and because my wife's phone is using my account it's basically a family plan Free!
Tempest in a teapot. Attitudinal surveys are notoriously inaccurate at predicting consumer behavior. Way too many unanswered questions about the survey methodology to give this any value.
The real test for Apple Music will come when the 3-month trials start expiring next month. Doesn't matter how a "user" is defined, since Apple provided no means to actually cancel the service (not the same thing as turning off the auto-renewal) prior to the end of the 3-month trial. The only measure that matters for a paid service is how many people actually choose to pay for the service. How many of those 11 million "users" will keep the service when actual money is involved?
IMO, 11 million subscribers might seem like a big number. But, that doesn't measure up well when compared to the size of iOS' overall user base, and considering how the persistently Apple promoted the service to iOS 8.4 users (40% of whom upgraded to version 8.4 within the first two weeks).
Strategically, it might have made business sense for Apple to forcibly shoehorn the DRM-enabled Apple Music together with DRM-free iTunes. But, as a user experience, it has failed long-time iTunes users. And so much of Apple's vaunted customer loyalty depends on that user experience. And what will happen to users' music libraries when the Apple Music trial period expires and they choose not to renew?
A lot of unknowns that surveys like this one don't address.