Apple looks to kill off free Spotify streaming to make more $$$ for itself

[RedDragon]

I've found myself listening to Julie Adenuga more than a couple of times

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Was more than a little surprised to hear David Rodigan on Beats 1 this morning! Spinning some great tunes too.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

I've never liked Spotify's UI, horrible stuff. Apple Music isn't better but it's deffo not worse ime.

 

[editor]

One Apple super fanboy has had enough of Apple Music.

Apple Music is a nightmare and I’m done with it

I love Apple. I love them because they take difficult problems and come up with innovative, simple solutions. The things they make just work and we trust them. Unfortunately, my experience with Apple Music has been exactly the opposite. As of today, I’m missing about 4,700 songs from my library with little hope of getting them back.

I had high hopes for Apple Music. I really wanted it to work and become my default music streaming service, but after the problems I’ve experienced over the last couple of weeks, I’m disabling it altogether.

My problems started about a week after installing Apple Music. While Apple Music Radio and Playlists worked well, adding music to my library is nothing short of a mind-blowing exercise in frustration.

I started to notice that whenever I added an album to my library, not all of the songs would get added. When I looked at the list of songs, there would be some missing—sometimes, most of the album would be missing. When I clicked the “Show Complete Album” button on my Mac, all of the missing songs would show up with an “Add” button beside them.

 

[mwgdrwg]

Works great for me lol, poor chap must be doing something wrong. It's great, will be paying at the end of my 3 month trial,

 

[Mojofilter]

I think it's really good to be fair. The curated playlists IMO are much, much better than on Spotify & the music it recommends to me has a far higher hit rate.

The key difference is that on Apple music it feels like all of the above is put together by a real person who really knows their music, where as Spotify always seems like it's just an algorithm (that keeps trying to make me to listen to Kasabian for some inexplicable reason).

 

[editor]

It's getting worse for Apple. And their policy of charging a 30% fee on recurring in-app purchases is a fucking disgrace (this means Spotify users on the $9.99/month deal have to pay another $3 per for subscription sales that are facilitated through the app).

Sen. Al Franken Urges Federal Probe Of Apple Music
Apple’s hefty fees on in-app subscription services are being called into serious question. In a letter addressed to both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, Sen. Al Franken called on federal regulators to look into possible Apple Music antitrust violations in the music streaming market.

Franken pointed to a number of non-competitive guidelines that he believes suppress app developers and stifle innovations that benefit the consumer.

“Increased competition in the music-streaming market should mean that consumers will ultimately benefit through more choices of better products and at lower prices,” Franken wrote in today’s letter. “I am concerned, however, that Apple’s position as a dominant platform operator may actually undermine many of the potential consumer benefits of its entry into the market. To protect consumer choice and promote greater transparency of pricing, I ask that you review Apple’s business practices with respect to its competitors in the music streaming market.”

Of particular interest to the Minnesota Democrat was the hefty 30% fee on recurring in-app purchases that Apple is currently shaking down other app developers for. For a subscription service like Spotify that generally runs the standard streaming rate of $9.99 per month, that means them having to tack on an extra $3 per for subscription sales that are facilitated through the app.

Spotify has been trying to raise awareness of this issue over the past few weeks by urging consumers to sign up for the service through the Spotify website rather than through the App Store (for $12.99), and save three bucks in the process. In doing so, they’re making a pretty obvious statement on how they believe Apple’s fee structure is directly harming consumers and making the music streaming market less competitive. Subscribers to Apple Music obviously don’t have to worry about paying the company an extra $3 to use the service.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/sen-al-franken-urges-federal-probe-of-apple-music/

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Works great for me lol, poor chap must be doing something wrong. It's great, will be paying at the end of my 3 month trial,

Yeah me too. Have to say it's utterly brilliant, listening to so much new music now, and Zane Lowe is wicked to listen to (love it when he gets totally taken by a tune!)!

Also paging £16 a month for me and five other people is a bloody good deal.

 

[editor]

Works great for me lol, poor chap must be doing something wrong. It's great, will be paying at the end of my 3 month trial,

Good job because you can't delete it

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/apple-apps-delete/

 

[mwgdrwg]

Good job because you can't delete it

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/apple-apps-delete/

I love the music player anyway...but deleting stock apps should be enabled as I've replaced a few of them (wunderlist for lists, outlook for email etc.). It's a pain having an apple junk folder. There are loads of good things about this iPhone, but it's not perfect. I prefer it to Android but I really miss my Blackberry...BB10 is the best OS by miles!

 

[sim667]

Good job because you can't delete it

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/apple-apps-delete/

Having the app on your iPhone does not force you to pay for apple music, you can still use the music app on your iPhone as a standalone player for the music that is on your phone. And you can still use the iTunes store to actually buy music.

Im not really sure what your point was...?

 

[Mr Retro]

Signed up for the trial today (mainly so I can listen to the new Dr Dre album) and if it's any good I'll dump Spotify. I enjoyed the interface setting it up with my preferences and stuff.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

The streaming/ all you can eat side is fucking awesome! The for you section is bloody great too.

I'm less impressed by Beats 1 after a month. Have discovered tons of new music via it but there's clearly some favorites being pushed that you end up hearing a bit too often. That said Zane's shows tend to be great!

 

[grit]

It's getting worse for Apple. And their policy of charging a 30% fee on recurring in-app purchases is a fucking disgrace.

Its actually pretty reasonable considering the infrastructure they provide to enable the purchase. Also nothing obviously stopping anyone going direct.

 

[belboid]

Its actually pretty reasonable considering the infrastructure they provide to enable the purchase. Also nothing obviously stopping anyone going direct.

Nonsense. It's a near monopoly that exploits its power to the max. The best that can be said for it is that it's appalling behaviour was a major driver of the open source movement

 

[grit]

Nonsense. It's a near monopoly that exploits its power to the max. The best that can be said for it is that it's appalling behaviour was a major driver of the open source movement

The app store was a major driver of the open source movement... LOL. How on earth do you figure that, considering the only languages you could use to productive a binary that will execute on their hardware, are specific to the platform.

 

[elbows]

belboid is completely wrong to say it was a major driver of open source software. But your rebuttal is wrong too. You can have open source apps that are only written in one language, only run on one platform etc. And its not strictly true that the only languages used are specific to the platform anyway. There are platform specific API's and obviously languages that Apple etc would prefer everyone use, but it is quite possible to write apps in other languages and have some intermediary mechanism make them run on the target OS.

 

[grit]

belboid is completely wrong to say it was a major driver of open source software. But your rebuttal is wrong too. You can have open source apps that are only written in one language, only run on one platform etc. And its not strictly true that the only languages used are specific to the platform anyway. There are platform specific API's and obviously languages that Apple etc would prefer everyone use, but it is quite possible to write apps in other languages and have some intermediary mechanism make them run on the target OS.

Objective-c and Swift can be used to written open source, however it's cringe inducing to read a closed platform would spur any further of OSS. It flies in the face of the whole concept. That intermediary mechanism, i.e the cross compilers still produce byte code in the form of the original languages.

Objective-c is essentially locked, Swift has some supporters playing with the idea of porting it but its still a pipe dream at the moment.

 

[belboid]

The app store was a major driver of the open source movement... LOL. How on earth do you figure that, considering the only languages you could use to productive a binary that will execute on their hardware, are specific to the platform.

because the developers hated its closed platform so designed something else in opposition to it, you thick cunt

 

[grit]

because the developers hated its closed platform so designed something else in opposition to it, you thick cunt

You are just embarrassing yourself at this stage mate.

 

[belboid]

You are just embarrassing yourself at this stage mate.

says the man with the reading problem

 

[elbows]

Objective-c and Swift can be used to written open source, however it's cringe inducing to read a closed platform would spur any further of OSS. It flies in the face of the whole concept. That intermediary mechanism, i.e the cross compilers still produce byte code in the form of the original languages.

Objective-c is essentially locked, Swift has some supporters playing with the idea of porting it but its still a pipe dream at the moment.

You moved the goalposts! And you've decided to shrink the definition of OSS to some puritan model of open source that is far more restricted than actual real world open source.

Your comments about 'byte code in the form of the original languages' sounds very much like you don't know what you are talking about either.

 

[elbows]

because the developers hated its closed platform so designed something else in opposition to it

No idea what you are referring to.

 

[belboid]

No idea what you are referring to.

I'll give you that it was wrong to say it was a 'major' driver - clearly OS was around long before the app store, but Apples closed systems in general - which were actually worse than Microsofts - was such a driver. And the app store did make Android be OS based

 

[elbows]

Thanks for the clarification. I pretty much disagree entirely though. If what you are saying were true, we might expect to find loads of open source projects that overcome the horrors of Apples closed and controlling ways for the benefit of users of Apple hardware. We don't see that at all, we see a relatively small community who are into alternative app-stores and jailbraking devices, stuff that may have overlaps with the opensouce community but is not the same thing.

Nor do I recognise how the App Store somehow massively influenced Googles choice of open/closed systems and languages when they were developing Android.

 

[elbows]

Swift has some supporters playing with the idea of porting it but its still a pipe dream at the moment.

You are out of date on that one. It's not all up and running yet but its far beyond the pipe-dream stage, and its not just supporters, Apple themselves are involved.

eg:

June 8 2015
Open Source
In addition to new features, the big news is that Apple will be making Swift open source later this year. We are all incredibly excited about this, and look forward to giving you a lot more information as the open source release gets nearer. Here is what we can tell you so far:

• Swift source code will be released under an OSI-approved permissive license.
• Contributions from the community will be accepted — and encouraged.
• At launch we intend to contribute ports for OS X, iOS, and Linux.
• Source code will include the Swift compiler and standard library.
• We think it would be amazing for Swift to be on all your favorite platforms.

( https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=29 )

 

[belboid]

Thanks for the clarification. I pretty much disagree entirely though. If what you are saying were true, we might expect to find loads of open source projects that overcome the horrors of Apples closed and controlling ways for the benefit of users of Apple hardware. We don't see that at all, we see a relatively small community who are into alternative app-stores and jailbraking devices, stuff that may have overlaps with the opensouce community but is not the same thing.

Nor do I recognise how the App Store somehow massively influenced Googles choice of open/closed systems and languages when they were developing Android.

the lack of the first (OS products 'overcoming' Apples problems) is exactly what drives the second. Most apple users, even tech confident ones, wont bother jailbreaking an iWhatever. If you want that openness, you use something else. Thus Samsung and Google use OS software, specifically to draw those people away from Apple. See Chapter 5 of Paul Mason's postcapitalism for the more complicated arguments abut why info tech must behave like that.

 

[grit]

You are out of date on that one. It's not all up and running yet but its far beyond the pipe-dream stage, and its not just supporters, Apple themselves are involved.

eg:

( https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=29 )

Get back to me when someone is risking the job they use to feed their kids by using it in production.

 

[elbows]

Get back to me when someone is risking the job they use to feed their kids by using it in production.

No I won't you tool, because thats you moving the goalposts again.

I may as well ask you to get back to me when you understand modern compilers, intermediate code, runtimes etc. Or perhaps you already understand them but have unusually low capacity to describe them accurately for a techie.

 

[elbows]

the lack of the first (OS products 'overcoming' Apples problems) is exactly what drives the second. Most apple users, even tech confident ones, wont bother jailbreaking an iWhatever. If you want that openness, you use something else. Thus Samsung and Google use OS software, specifically to draw those people away from Apple. See Chapter 5 of Paul Mason's postcapitalism for the more complicated arguments abut why info tech must behave like that.

OK the problem is probably that you are using open source as a much, much looser term than it actually is. I take it you are incorporating things such as whether the end users are allowed to install software from non-Apple-approved sources. Thats not an open source issue, and I'm not just being pedantic about this. For example one reason why this stuff is a confusing nonsense is that there are opensource apps in the app store. Now when it comes to the OS itself then thats a different matter, clearly users and other 3rd parties can't just start modifying iOS itself, and thats at least in part an opensource issue, yes. It's only one of the reasons the likes of Google went down that route though, they had others such as not wanting to reinvent the wheel and already having a strong tendency towards open source initiatives due to all their work involving web platforms.

By the way, since we've ended up on this subject I should probably mention that since Apple have a new dev program for individuals that doesn't involve a yearly fee, effectively anyone with the inclination to do so should now be able to write or obtain source code for iOS device apps and get that application running on their device.