Apple Music continues to grow, Billboard reporting that it has now hit 30M paid subscribers – up from 27M in June. But Jimmy Iovine, who heads up the service, thinks what Apple is offering to subscribers isn’t yet good enough.
He made the remarks in a new interview …
Iovine told Billboard that he thinks the service is heading in the right direction, but that all streaming music services need to do more to ensure their future.
He suggests that streaming music in itself is becoming a commodity item, and that Apple Music is busy working on what he sees as the industry’s biggest challenge.
Goldman Sachs issued a report in August predicting that subscription streaming would drive the global record business to nearly triple to $41 billion by 2030. But [Iovine says] the report “just doesn’t work for me.” The forecast, he claims, fails to properly account for the easy money that older catalog music currently pulls in, not to mention the competition from free platforms like YouTube.
Beats 1 creative director Zane Lowe says that it’s about more than the music itself.
Apple also wants to change the Billboard approach of giving equal weight to free and paid streams when calculating chart positions.
The whole interview is an interesting read.
LTE music streaming just hit the latest watchOS beta – see the video below for details.
