Apple Music Likely To Face Competition And Criticism

Apple Music has to deal with rivalry, criticism and competition before its launch.

Apple Inc.’s annual World Wide Developers Conference for the year 2015 took place earlier this month. The highlight of the show were the launch of its much awaited online music streaming service Apple Music along with the launch of their upcoming operating system for Apple products.

The WWDC broadcasted Apple Music to a great extent. The idea behind this service is to bring users and music streaming under one consolidated umbrella. It is said that this service will be a direct competitor to Tidal and Spotify where the former holds almost 49 percent of the total market share. The Swedish platform has a strong position and it will be relatively difficult for Apple Music to overthrow them so easily. Spotify is not really a major threat. The service has 60 million active users among which only one-fourth of them actually pay for the service.

Apple’s entry into the online music industry is not something astonishing. The company previously acquired Beats Electronics the previous year for $3.2 billion which is said to be a record-breaking deal. Apart from that, the company has immense success with its music downloading platform iTunes.

Apple faced its first setback in FY13 since its launch which occurred 10 years back since the online music subscription trend rose by 50 percent in that tenure. So now when Apple is actually coming up with its own online music streaming service, then the impact will be observed on iTunes as the trend of digital downloads will further decline. This is quite similar to how initially Apple iPhones took over the iPods because of their mass storage capacity.

Apple Music is the first initiative by the company to enter the music streaming market so at this point users will not be comfortable in shelving out $10 monthly if they don’t know what the service actually holds for them. So the company has announced a three-month free trial to its customers so that they get the heck of it.

Recently, the company dealt with criticism when one of the renowned pop icons, Taylor Swift decided to remove her popular alum from Apple Music since the company decided not to pay artists during the free three month trial period. So Apple had to deal with criticism and eventually decided to pay artists during the free three month trial period.

Thus Apple Music does have its pros and cons but the response can only be governed once it is officially launched by the company.