Apple announces even fewer reasons to own music and “screw you” to musicians. Planted Apple employees in crowd cheer on cue. (Pun intended.)
Off topic in one sense: The recent change from Iphoto to Photos is a disaster that is typical of the “New Apple” In Iphoto one could sort your photos. Now one cannot. It’s like Apple broke into your home and rearranged all your photos by gluing them to a wall in time order. Apple is stupid but this wasn’t a mistake, it was malicious. I intend to resist all future lyingly-named “upgrades” of Apple products. Cheers.
When have musicians ever not gotten screwed? It has throughout history been a terrible profession.
The music service was probably the least interesting part of the keynote from where I was sitting. I was VERY interested in the new search API with deep linking, micro locations, multitasking, and the expansion of Apple Wallet.
Also, all of the new access we have via WatchOS2.
Of course, I wasn’t there at Moscone, I was in my office watching the keynote with other iOS developers.
I think there was about five years in the 70s when musicians could get a good deal.
Come now, no one really thinks they “own” music any more (unless you happen to be a rights holder).
I liked to imagine in the 90s that if there was ever a paid service that could do what Napster did, I would do it in a heartbeat. Now there is Spotify and it is my favorite monthly service, second to the Internet. I won’t be so brash is to suggest that it has changed my life, but it has definitely changed the way I interact with music for the better.
The only negative thing I can think about when it comes to Spotify, is that many artists get the short end of the stick when it comes to recouping profits. But the only person to blame here is the recording labels. Every single economic analysis of subscription-based services has demonstrated this with clarity.
Not really. Even back then, the vast majority of musicians ended up owing their label money by the end of their contract (to cover the money they fronted you for production/marketing).
Radio rates were (and still are) so low that a musician could never hope to make a living off of them - plus they are only paid out to composers, so anyone who plays someone else’s song wasn’t getting paid diddly.
Venues, the booking agent and your manager took a huge chunk of your live performance income.
Really, unless your goal is to go into debt and live off of taco trucks, becoming a musician sucks. Well except for potential fame. Hard to put a price on even minor fame.
But I do not want my watch to play music. If I wanted my watch to play music, it would me Westminster Chimes played with shrill little square waves like my old Casio digital. That thing could wake the dead.
Maybe I should have said “buy music.” Streaming is, in the opinion of my musician friends, destroying the possibility of a musician making a living from their music. I was hoping Apple was going to offer a solution to this problem, but all they had to say in the presentation about Apple Music was that it would be easier for musicians to get noticed. In other words “exposure” which sounds pretty familiar and becomes even less useful when the music is available with a $10 monthly streaming fee that gives you access to all the music in the iTunes store.
Maybe there is a way to makes tracks available only with album purchase. That would make sense, but they said nothing about that in the presentation. That would be like the old world idea of singles on the radio leading to album purchase.
I am an Apple believer. I was disappointed. Maybe I am wrong. I hope so.
“One hot feature: a way to shut up background music quickly rather than having to hunt through tabs looking for the offending embed.”
Is this different from the MUTE button on my keyboard?
Yeah, it doesn’t mute whatever else you may be intentionally listening to.
Maybe I’m “weird” but I do not want a service to recommend music based on music I already have. I like to discover new music, things I haven’t heard before, emergent stuff, or stuff from countries or regions that are unfamiliar to me. Recommendation services tend to homogenize what I hear, and I don’t want that at all.
The music thing looks … fine, I guess. What I do wonder is how they’ll convince people to move from their existing and equally fine (and crossplatform) services, where they’ve put some time into creating playlists and finding people to follow and the like. Merely saying that it’s revolutionary isn’t enough to make it so.
i hope they start to really innovate again… i’m worried that they have been mostly stagnant lately, riding incremental improvements to size, weight, and pixel density.
adding a few features that I can already get through third party apps isn’t worthy of a new os version, imho, and that has been the core of the last how many os releases now?
i personally use apple computers because the build quality is amazing and i love osx, but where are the touch screens? the tablets with built in digitizers?
don’t get me wrong I love apple, that’s why i’m rooting for them to get off their arses and back into the game.
while i don’t agree with everything in this video, much of apples innovation has been imitation but done with class, apparently i’m not the only person worried by the lag in innovation from apple…
Force touch, Apple Watch, A brand new language, Swift, that everyone loves. There were cellphones and computers before Apple, but not as complete or useful. Apple’s real innovation has always been getting the design out of the hands of lackeys and accountants. Then suddenly everyone is all, like, “Oh, we do that too.” missing the essential differences of transparent function and getting out of the way.
Errr… Yes and no. Mostly no.
The thing is, that historically, the only time it’s ever been possible to make money selling music itself was due to a technical blip between about 1940 and 2000- When the cost to make duplicates was cheap on an industrial scale and expensive on a personal scale. For a couple decades before that, making records was extremely expensive, and record players were only in wealthy homes, so there just wasn’t much market. Once it became possible to share MP3s for free online, the bottom just dropped out.
For the entire rest of human history, though, music has paid in two ways: Through live performance, and through patronage.
We like to say that when we play a gig, we’re not being paid for the time we spend on stage- We’re being paid for the hours of rehearsal, the thousands of dollars in equipment, and the years honing our skills. I think it’s time to just accept that recorded music is another one of those things that we get paid for via performances, rather than directly for.
Swift is a great language, i do love it, but the average user doesn’t know or notice what language was used to develop an app, so I guess technically it is an innovation, just one targeted for developers and has little impact on users. I personally use frameworks that allow me to compile apps for multiple mobile platforms, because maintaining multiple code bases for each app is too much for a small development shop, and we cannot afford to skip android since it is now at 80% market share.
Force touch, not really…there are plenty of notebooks with touchpad variations, from haptic feedback, to pressure sensitivity, to digitizer support. I’ve been underwhelmed by force touch, meh.
I love apple products, I just worry at the key areas where they are seriously lagging and huge decrease of innovation in recent years. They still have class and quality. I’m rooting for them. Just worried and being more and more saddened by what is lacking and enticed by alternatives, i can see that reaching a tipping point that i’d rather not see. I’ve experienced that enough times in my computer usage history to know that if they don’t kick things up a notch it is inevitable. It takes more work to stay on top then to get to the top, and most companies fail at the former.
It isn’t just new innovations that are lagging, it is key features and areas that are missing altogether. It is mind boggling that apple makes iPads and iPhones, yet none of its computers are touch enabled, and they offer no tablet pc. If you hook a touch screen up to a mac, you’ll quickly see the serious amount of work that has to be done to OSX to bring it up to speed for touch enabled devices, and the digitizer support (ink) also lags years behind.
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