Why music fans will be the real winners from the battle between Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and the rest
To borrow from the vernacular of George Ergatoudis, BBC Radio 1’s head of music, the “huge disruptive monster” finally came down the hill this week.
With all the glitz and fanfare we’ve come to expect from the Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, Apple Music was unveiled on Monday; and since then a seemingly endless supply of industry reaction and opinion has flowed, starting with Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s hastily deleted ‘Oh ok’ tweet to this humble missive, and everything in between.
So is it the Spotify-killer that so many headlines heralded? Does it represent a turning point for music streaming? Will it revolutionise how people consume music? While you would never rule anything out when it comes to Apple, I think that remains to be seen. To be fair, that would’ve been a lot to expect from a single event.
The music industry’s worst kept secret was never going to have too many surprises and, indeed, by the time the two and a half hour presentation drew to a close, there was little revealed that had not been heavily trailed.
We’ve become so accustomed to being blown away by innovation in new category launches coming out of Cupertino, that it's not surprising so many were on the edge of their seats. After all, when it launched the iPod in 2001 and the iTunes Store in 2003, the company truly transformed the recorded music industry, and quickly dominated global digital music retailing.
However, these are different times and music streaming is a whole other beast. For once, Apple is playing the role of follower, and it has some catching up to do.
The market leader, Spotify, has been in the game for almost a decade now, steadily growing user numbers, and to accelerated levels in recent years. In fact, on Wednesday, it shot back with an impressive update of 20 million paying subscribers and 75 million active users. The markets seem to still have faith too, as the Swedish company announced the closure of another major funding round of $526m this week, now pushing its valuation over $8bn.
Not only that, in anticipation of Apple Music, Spotify recently announced its evolution into a multi-faceted entertainment platform through the addition of a raft of new features, including premium video content and programming formats supplied by a host of global leading media partners (LoveLive included), activity-based playlists, and much more.
So, while Apple Music’s “all in one place” offering is certainly comprehensive, many established market players would claim their sophisticated propositions rival anything it has to offer; and not just Spotify, but Pandora, Tidal, YouTube Music Key, Amazon Prime, and the rest.
Again though, these are different times and Apple is a very different company. In 2003, music was strategically key to propelling the company into the giant it is today. Whereas now, even if the sheer scale of Apple’s user base allows its new music service to grab the same number of subscribers as Spotify within a year, that will represent just 1 per cent of company revenues.
Apple is now firmly in the hardware selling business, not the music selling business. So, there is less of a need to transform and dominate the market. In music, it just needs to be on par with its main tech hardware competitors to provide one less reason for consumers not to make the switch to Apple products.
It is still early days in this fascinating music streaming battle but it seems, whatever the future holds, the real winner is shaping up to be the music fan and the music industry.
While debate still rages about the respective merits of algorithmic versus human curation, fans are just going ahead exploring and discovering how they prefer, from multiple different sources, like they always did. It’s just now they have more choice and tools than ever before.
So more people than ever are enjoying and experiencing music in new ways: whether listening to Muse’s new track on Spotify; watching a Taylor Swift music video on YouTube; or viewing Blur’s first live performance in New York for 15 years on a publisher website via our own LPlayer video platform.
As Apple enters music streaming, competition will intensify, compelling the entire industry to rise to new levels in the fight to grab consumer attention. This can only be a good thing.
And despite talk of exclusive content, and walled-garden services, I believe there is plenty of room in this beautiful “fragmented mess” of a music market for lots of players to provide fans what they want, where they want and when they want it. I’m excited to see what comes next.
Richard Cohen is founder and CEO of global music media company LoveLive