Apple Music

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MusicBot is the Shortcuts Companion to Apple Music

Andrew Orr ·

Federico Viticci recently announced his shortcut called MusicBot, which he says is the all-in-one assistant to Apple Music.

I created MusicBot for two reasons: I wanted to speed up common interactions with the Music app by using custom actions in the Shortcuts app; and I also wanted to build a series of “utilities” for Apple Music that could be bundled in a single, all-in-one shortcut instead of dozens of smaller, standalone ones.

I haven’t used this yet but Mr. Viticci is a master of shortcuts so I’m confident it’s a great tool to use.

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Apple Removes ‘Rewound’ App That Made Your iPhone Look Like an iPod

Andrew Orr ·

Apple has removed the music app called Rewound that let people download skins to make the app look like old iPods.

To be fair, the iPod skins didn’t come pre-installed with the Rewound app—users had to download them separately once the app was installed. Though, you only have to look at tweets from users to see that the skins did in fact, look very much like the iPod Classic. However, Apple also reportedly took issue with the fact Rewound charged users for Apple Music features. Rewound says this was “less unreasonable” but noted that Apple had already approved in-app purchases before click wheel skins became popular.

”Less unreasonable.” I’d say that charging people for another company’s service is a big NO NO.

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Spotify Reaches 113 Million Paid Subscribers

Andrew Orr ·

Spotify announced that it reached 113 million paid subscribers around the world, and it’s growing twice as fast as Apple Music.

We continue to feel very good about our competitive position in the market. Relative to Apple, the publicly available data shows that we are adding roughly twice as many subscribers per month as they are. Additionally, we believe that our monthly engagement is roughly 2x as high and our churn is at half the rate.

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Zane Lowe Talks About The Future of Apple Music

Andrew Orr ·

Beats 1 DJ Zane Lowe talks about where Apple Music is headed in a new interview. When it comes to Beats 1, Apples radio show, the team found something interesting.

It turns out users are four times more likely to complete an album if they’d pre-added it to their collection, 1.5 times more likely to listen to it again and they listen to music four times longer than other Apple Music subscribers. In short, Apple is trying to build a better hype machine than its rivals to counteract the popular, but depersonalised playlists that have come to dominate music streaming.

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Apple Beta Tests Official Apple Music Web Player

Andrew Orr ·

Apple is starting to get the hang of what being a services company really means. Charlotte and I have wrote about unofficial web players for Apple Music, and now Apple is beta testing an official one.

To use the new Apple Music web version, subscribers can visit the link beta.music.apple.com and sign in with their Apple ID.

At launch, the service includes many core features, like searching and playing songs from the Apple Music catalog, searching and playing songs from your library (if Sync Library is enabled), accessing your playlists and more.

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New Shazam Discovery Playlist for Apple Music

Andrew Orr ·

Today Apple Music launches the Shazam Discovery Top 50 playlist, which is a weekly global ranking of 50 trending artists.

The chart will be updated every Tuesday and is exclusively available to stream on Apple Music. Artists at the top of the first list include Ohana Bam, A$ton Wyld, Tones and I and Regard…The chart ranks songs that are trending in the U.S. and “over 10 countries”; artists from more countries will be featured soon.

Sounds cool but I hope it’s not filled with hip-hop, because that seems to be Apple Music’s focus.