AppleZulu

There are a lot of incorrect assumptions and disinformation in this thread. Maybe read up on the tech before writing about it. 

DAalseth said:

AppleZulu said:

DAalseth said:

AppleZulu said:

DAalseth said:

This weekend when I went into Music to play my own library, up popped an ad for Apple Classical. I read it, and came to a promotional video. I clicked on it to get an idea of what it will be like.

The video would only play if I already subscribed to AppleMusic.

Considering that part of the rational for AC is to get more people to subscribe to AM, putting your ad for AC behind an AM paywall, something many of us don’t subscribe to, is pretty F-ing stupid. 

So far I’ve not been impressed with how Apple is handling AC. I’ll wait for the reviews, but…

Given that they're only rolling it out on iPhones initially, it would not be unreasonable to think that Apple is going for a bit of a 'soft opening' here, in order to get their sea legs. Starting with a single platform that is not typically connected to a lot of non-Apple gear, and also focusing on existing Apple Music subscribers will significantly narrow the variables they have to keep up with during the initial startup. This way, they can deal primarily with making sure the system is working as intended. 

Classical music fans who already have their own libraries set up and listen it on an AppleTV hooked to a sound system, or worse, a Mac hooked to a sound system, or still yet worse, a PC hooked to a sound system and still yet even worse, haven't previously subscribed to a streaming service are all going to be prone to claiming that the system isn't working, not because the system actually isn't working, but because it's not working the way they have independently devised a digital classical music catalog to work. 

Apple Music Classical is at long last a major music provider coming along to fill the void left by streaming, digital download and physical record stores that have all always structured their systems to cater to popular music. The thing is, while there's been a void, there hasn't been a vacuum. Just about every classical music enthusiast will have improvised their own file tagging and cataloging, etc., and each one of them will have done so a little differently, and with a high level of confidence that their way is the right way. This means that for almost all of those enthusiasts, Apple Music Classical will have done it the wrong way, or at minimum, not the best way. Many will want to be able to customize the AMC UI to make it work their way, and that's almost surely not going to be a thing. 

So yeah, it's probably a good idea for them to do a soft opening on the iPhone geared primarily to people who already have an Apple Music subscription. 

I’ll grant you some of what you say. BUT not letting people see the promotional video unless they have an AM subscription is a chrome plated neon light illuminated F-up. Fine to do a soft roll out, but the idea is to get a buzz going. Get people interested and excited for when they do open it up wider. To lock up their commercials is just stupid. 

They are competing against the classical streaming service I already have and have paid for, and are losing BADLY. 

Which classical streaming service is that?

AllClassical {dot} org.
It’s the streaming service of a public broadcasting station out of Portland Oregon. Plays a nice variety of music, the hosts are very knowledgeable, they have some special programs, you can go back and see what they played, and they have links to purchase it if you want. They even have their own App.

So, a public radio station. That’s cool. I support my local public radio station. 

DAalseth said:

AppleZulu said:

DAalseth said:

This weekend when I went into Music to play my own library, up popped an ad for Apple Classical. I read it, and came to a promotional video. I clicked on it to get an idea of what it will be like.

The video would only play if I already subscribed to AppleMusic.

Considering that part of the rational for AC is to get more people to subscribe to AM, putting your ad for AC behind an AM paywall, something many of us don’t subscribe to, is pretty F-ing stupid. 

So far I’ve not been impressed with how Apple is handling AC. I’ll wait for the reviews, but…

Given that they're only rolling it out on iPhones initially, it would not be unreasonable to think that Apple is going for a bit of a 'soft opening' here, in order to get their sea legs. Starting with a single platform that is not typically connected to a lot of non-Apple gear, and also focusing on existing Apple Music subscribers will significantly narrow the variables they have to keep up with during the initial startup. This way, they can deal primarily with making sure the system is working as intended. 

Classical music fans who already have their own libraries set up and listen it on an AppleTV hooked to a sound system, or worse, a Mac hooked to a sound system, or still yet worse, a PC hooked to a sound system and still yet even worse, haven't previously subscribed to a streaming service are all going to be prone to claiming that the system isn't working, not because the system actually isn't working, but because it's not working the way they have independently devised a digital classical music catalog to work. 

Apple Music Classical is at long last a major music provider coming along to fill the void left by streaming, digital download and physical record stores that have all always structured their systems to cater to popular music. The thing is, while there's been a void, there hasn't been a vacuum. Just about every classical music enthusiast will have improvised their own file tagging and cataloging, etc., and each one of them will have done so a little differently, and with a high level of confidence that their way is the right way. This means that for almost all of those enthusiasts, Apple Music Classical will have done it the wrong way, or at minimum, not the best way. Many will want to be able to customize the AMC UI to make it work their way, and that's almost surely not going to be a thing. 

So yeah, it's probably a good idea for them to do a soft opening on the iPhone geared primarily to people who already have an Apple Music subscription. 

I’ll grant you some of what you say. BUT not letting people see the promotional video unless they have an AM subscription is a chrome plated neon light illuminated F-up. Fine to do a soft roll out, but the idea is to get a buzz going. Get people interested and excited for when they do open it up wider. To lock up their commercials is just stupid. 

They are competing against the classical streaming service I already have and have paid for, and are losing BADLY. 

Which classical streaming service is that?

It strains credulity to think someone would click on a "weed.dmg" app, voluntarily enter their system login info and expect things to go well from there.

melgross said:

spheric said:

melgross said:

Spotify continues to generate losses. I’ve been saying for several years that the only companies that will be able to offer music streaming on a large scale will be companies that offer it as a service, as additive to their other, much larger businesses.

This would be the final nail in the commoditisation of music. 

In which bizarre universe is the logical business choice simply accepting that there is no way to make any money off streaming business model, and in consequence reducing it to a loss-leading add-on? I mean, rather than figuring that THE FUCKING BUSINESS MODEL DOESN'T WORK? 

I'm slightly irate over this because at NO POINT in this (mis)judgement of business viability do the interests of those supplying the actual content ever enter into the equation. 

Oh, so you've built a "business" around ripping us off and giving everything we make away, conditioned customers to expect access to everything for free or ad-free for price of three Starbucks coffees a month, and haven't figured out how to make a profit? 

Well, now. I have this D-sub tie-line cable that would like a word with you. 

The problem is that except for a very tiny number of subscribers of Tidal and QoBuz, and by tiny, I mean just a few hundred thousand between them, the market has shown that people don’t want to spend more than about $10 per month for streaming. Several companies have tried to charge $15, but dropped it and went out of business.

seriously, it’s the potential customers. When ‘tidal first appeared here I had a fairly long discussion with the then CEO. I asked him what he was trying to do here. He said that young people, including college students would race to pay $20 a month got CD quality music. I told him he was nuts. I asked why he was demo’ing at a high end audio show if he believed what he said, rather than at some gathering for young people, such as a ComicCon. His answer was garbled. He really had no idea. We see what happened. When it was bought, they immediately released a compressed version for $9.95.

remember that what every streaming company is paying was negotiated. It wasn’t simply a; “This is what we’re going to pay you.” So there’s a connection between what can be paid for a company to stay in business, and what recording companies and artists want to get paid. Unfortunately, it come back to what consumers are willing to pay. Somewhere in there is where the payment per stream lies.

Tidal's implementation of Dolby Atmos was a certified cluster. Excited to see their promotions that it would be available via an AppleTV app so that I could play it through my surround sound speaker setup, I signed up for Tidal's premium tier plan to get access to their lossless and Atmos content. 

Their UI was terrible. At the start, they had some Atmos-featuring song playlists, and they had a "new Atmos releases" list of albums. You could not search for Atmos-enabled content. If an album did have Atmos-formated content, the same album would also be available in a compressed stereo format, and possibly a lossless stereo format. You couldn't tell which was which until you clicked on the album, so you'd have to play a shell game to find the one you wanted. The list of "new" Atmos releases was limited to 30 albums, so adding a new album meant an old one dropped off of the list. Since you couldn't search specifically for Atmos content, if you hadn't noted down or saved things that were in that list before, good luck finding them again later. Luckily, this entire approach meant there wasn't enough consumer interest generated for the format to cause anyone to go out of their way to create new Atmos mixes, so the "new" Atmos album list stayed pretty static most of the time. It also meant I'd listened at least once to the things I wanted to hear in Atmos fairly quickly, and they weren't adding new material at a rate that warranted the expense of an extra music subscription. Their UI was so bad I definitely wasn't going to replace Apple Music with Tidal.

I even sent an inquiry to their customer support, and received a reply that they'd share my idea with their engineers for being able to search for or otherwise easily browse to find Dolby Atmos content, but they didn't think there were any plans to do anything like that. This was for a feature that they were paying to heavily advertise, and that they were charging a premium to access. So I did used free trial, probably paid for a month, then dropped it in hopes that Apple would do something better. Apple did something better.

It's no surprise that their CEO had no idea who his prospective audience was. The pricing meant he should've been courting audiophiles, but the user interface meant he was really chasing people who don't care what they're listening to. The ambivalent audience isn't going to pay the premium, and the audiophile audience isn't going to pay to dig through a figurative Walmart bin of crap titles, hoping to randomly find content they actually want.