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For anyone upset that they missed Burna Boy‘s sold-out London Stadium show from June 3, Apple Music has you covered. The show will exclusively stream on Apple Music Live starting Wednesday, but Billboard has a first look at his “Last Last” performance below. Fans of the African Giant performer can catch his whole set on […]
What better way to soak up the sun than with the boys of SEVENTEEN? The K-pop superstar group’s Joshua and Vernon are teaming up to host a special summer radio show on Apple Music 1, aptly titled Summer Vacation With Joshua and Vernon of SEVENTEEN. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest […]
In a presentation at the Music Biz conference in Nashville on Wednesday (May 17), MIDiA Research’s Tatiana Cirisano revealed the company’s predictions about the future of music streaming. Namely, the firm suspects that music streaming revenue growth, which has been in the double digits for years, will slow to the single digits, eventually cooling off from about 10% growth in 2024 to 3% growth in 2029.
“We’re in a crazy time for competing for consumer attention,” said Cirisano during the presentation, titled Where Does Streaming Go From Here? She noted that after the pandemic subsided, content providers of all kinds — from music to gaming to video — have had to accept that more traditional, in-person activities are absorbing large amounts of time for consumers once again. “The era of build it and they will come is starting to come to a close,” she continued. “You need to give people reasons to spend time on your platform.”
As part of the return to in-person experiences, MIDiA Research has found that background consumption of entertainment is on the rise, with 18.1 hours of background consumption in the first quarter of 2021 having escalated to 20.6 hours in the second quarter of 2022.
Traditional streaming services — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and other competitors — also face competition for users’ attention from “non-[digital service provider] streaming,” or platforms where music is part of the experience but not its sole focus, such as Peloton and TikTok. “We are starting to learn that non-DSP streaming is not just additive, it might actually also diminish the cultural capital of [traditional] streaming,” said Cirisano.
While the cultural capital of streaming reached a fever pitch as Spotify editorial playlists, like Rap Caviar and New Music Friday, became many listener’s go-to source for music suggestions, MIDiA’s data suggests that that “soft power” is starting to wane, giving way to sites like TikTok which promote what Cirisano called “lean-through” music consumption.
This can be a positive thing, she explained. While “lean back,” or background, consumption — such as pre-programmed playlists and radio play — is on the rise, young people are also more likely than ever to not just “lean forward” (meaning they program what music they listen to themselves) but to “lean through,” which Cirisano defined as creating social content, curating content and re-creating content with music. MIDiA has found that the average 16 to 19-year-old spends 3.7 hours per week creating content as of the fourth quarter of 2022. More than ever, young people want to be actively playful and interactive with their music, not just listen to static playlists on streaming — though that form of listening will still surely persist.
To Mark Mulligan, MIDiA’s founder, this is a repeat of history, said Cirisano. Prior to recorded music, live bands’ music would be impacted by the audience in front of them. Now, this has taken on a new form in the age of social media, AI and at-home recording technology, signaling a return to interactivity present throughout the long history of music — and marking a change in appetite from the “isolating” and “hyper-personalized” nature of today’s popular music streaming services. “This new generation wants to be more actively involved in music… I think you’re going to have an advantage if you’re an artist that is comfortable engaging with your fans,” said Cirisano.
MIDiA Research has also found that with the emergence of hyper-personalized algorithms on streaming and social platforms, listenership fragments significantly. This leads to superstars having less of an impact, making it harder for that class of artists to earn a fruitful living from just streaming alone. In tandem with creating content and forging brand partnerships, however, these bigger names can capitalize on their fandom. This atomization of the mainstream is also pushing DSPs to differentiate themselves by, for example, focusing on genre, like Apple Music Classical, or targeting audiophile listeners, like Tidal.
In the future, MIDiA’s data suggests that next-generation platforms will create three-sided marketplaces that operate as self-contained virtuous circles. Audiences will consume music, some fans in the audience will also create using the music, and that consumption and participation will signal the algorithm and distribute the music to new fans.
UPDATE: This story was updated May 17 at 7:59 p.m. ET to note that music streaming revenue growth — not music streaming subscription growth, as incorrectly stated in a previous version of the story — is expected to fall to 3% by 2029. It was also updated to note that background consumption of all entertainment, not just music, is on the rise.
Apple Music wants to guide you to your next concert. On Tuesday (May 16), the platform launched a pair of new live music discovery tools intended to deliver users to global shows. The first of these tools lives on Apple Maps, where the service has launched guides for 14 global cities — Chicago, Detroit, Los […]
Apple Music Live is returning for season two on Wednesday (May 10), and Ed Sheeran is kicking off the live performance series by performing his upcoming album – (pronounced Subtract) in full for the first time.
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Sheeran will be delivering the album alongside a 12-piece band that includes Aaron Dessner of The National, who worked with the 32-year-old superstar to produce and co-write the project. The performance will debut on Wednesday (May 10) at noon PT via Apple Music’s website here and Apple TV+.
“I’m delighted to share my Subtract album show with you,” Sheeran said in a press release. “I was really nervous on the day, as it was my first time performing the new album tracks. The show was brought to life by Aaron and the incredible band, and it was an honor to stand beside them. It was an emotional night, but I’m so pleased we got to document it.”
The 14-track new album arrived on Friday (May 5) via Atlantic Records, marking the final installment in Sheeran’s decade-long mathematical album era, following 2011’s +, 2014’s x, 2017’s ÷ and 2021’s =.
“I felt like I was drowning, head below the surface, looking up but not being able to break through for air,” Sheeran said of the inspiration behind the album when announcing it back in March. “As an artist I didn’t feel like I could credibly put a body of work into the world that didn’t accurately represent where I am and how I need to express myself at this point in my life. This album is purely that. It’s opening the trapdoor into my soul. For the first time I’m not trying to craft an album people will like, I’m merely putting something out that’s honest and true to where I am in my adult life. This is last February’s diary entry and my way of making sense of it. This is Subtract.”
After teeing up Wall Street for a difficult fiscal second quarter, the tech giant Apple beat analyst expectations for the quarter, delivering revenue of $94.8 billion (expectations were for $92.9 billion), down 3 percent year over year, and earnings per share of $1.52, flat compared to last year (expectations were for an EPS of $1.43).
Apple’s services segment, which includes Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade and other offerings, continues to grow at a rapid clip, reporting revenue of $20.9 billion, a new record.
The company reported net income of $24.16 billion, down from $25 billion a year ago.
“We are pleased to report an all-time record in Services and a March quarter record for iPhone despite the challenging macroeconomic environment, and to have our installed base of active devices reach an all-time high,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “We continue to invest for the long term and lead with our values, including making major progress toward building carbon neutral products and supply chains by 2030.”
Apple also increased its dividend and announced an additional $90 billion in share repurchases.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Apple Music announced on Thursday night (April 13) that Suga will be launching Agust D Radio in support of his debut solo album D-DAY.
“Set your alarms, #SUGA is coming to Apple Music Radio!” the streamer tweeted. “Get ready for the release of his debut solo album #D_DAY and tune in to #AgustDRadio weekly at 7PM PT Mondays / 11AM KST Tuesdays.”
The BTS member’s first radio show, titled “Ep. 1 Dream,” will premiere next Monday (April 17) just days ahead of D-DAY’s unveiling the following Friday (April 21) via BigHit Music. (For now, the themes of the five episodes to follow the full-length’s release remain a mystery to be revealed at a later date.)
ARMY from all across the world couldn’t hold back their excitement at the news, flooding the replies with tweets like “AgustD Radio and 5 eps ??? OH YESSS IM READY LETSGO” and “Yes! As an AM user for years and BTS fan and Yoongi biased, I appreciate it.” Others showed their dedication by vowing to listen to each episode even if they aired as early as 4 a.m. in their time zone, with one fan in particular declaring, “I WILL BE WAKING UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT FOR YOONGI ONLY.”
In other BTS news, Suga was recently named an official ambassador for the NBA, a role that will play into his upcoming world tour for D-DAY. Meanwhile, the boy band’s traveling exhibition Proof is headed to Los Angeles to commemorate the septet’s 10-year anniversary as a group.
Check out Apple Music’s announcement of Agust D Radio below.
Even if classical music made up just 1% of U.S. music consumption in 2022, according to Luminate, Apple’s new streaming service dedicated to the genre could mean big things for the subscription market.
Global recorded music revenues rose for the eighth straight year in 2022 — but markets are maturing, and the once high-flying growth rate fell to single digits. That doesn’t mean the music subscription business is getting stale, though. In fact, there are plenty of new ideas and much-needed innovations that can help push the streaming market forward.
The latest, and one of the best, examples of how the music business can build a better mousetrap is Apple Music Classical. Apple wanted to better serve classical music fans but realized the best path was to break away from the Apple Music subscription app that works fine for every other genre. So, it built Apple Music Classical, a standalone app for Apple’s iOS devices — the Android app will arrive later — that launched on Tuesday to some rave reviews (GQ called it “a ton of fun”).
Classical music has always been a second-class citizen in digital music because of the way its metadata — information about the recording — is organized. For most genres, describing music by artist, track and album is an adequate way to organize a massive number of recordings. Download stores and streaming services are built around this classification system. But since the advent of iTunes and download purchases, people have recognized that classical music doesn’t fit well in the standard metadata system. In classical music, music is better organized by such categories as conductor, orchestra and movement. This could help explain why classical music accounted for 2.7% of U.S. digital album sales but just 0.8% of on-demand streams in the U.S. last year, according to Luminate.
“It’s the works-based nature of classical,” says Dart Music founder Chris McMurtry, now a vp at Pex, a digital music rights company. “That’s why Apple had to build a separate app.” McMurtry addressed that problem at Dart Music, a digital distributor that focused on classical music and built a database with metadata fields better suited for the genre.
Apple wasn’t the first company to see an opportunity in classical music. Dart Music launched in 2015 to tackle the metadata angle (its assets were acquired in 2017 by Haawk), and classical-focused streaming isn’t new, either. Idagio debuted in 2015. Primephonic launched in 2019 and was acquired by Apple in 2021. Universal Music Group’s Deutsche Grammophon imprint debuted its own service, Stage+, in 2022.
But Apple’s entry into the classical music streaming market could be the most impactful to date. Apple has billions of customers around the globe and an increasingly successful services business that includes the Apple Music subscription app and Apple TV+, a streaming video-on-demand platform. Those cloud-based services, combined with Apple’s bread-and-butter business of selling smartphones and laptops, give the company the resources and marketing might to activate a passionate group of music aficionados that has been underserved by streaming platforms better suited for rock, pop and hip-hop.
“It exceeded my expectations,” says McMurtry, who looked up well-known names and obscure composers to appreciate the app’s level of detail. He says he was impressed by the depth of metadata — the producers, engineers, mixers, other contributors, year of the recording and even the composers’ birth and death years. “It’s a very educational experience.”
If Apple Music Classical can hook McMurtry, maybe it can lure more people into the music subscription market. In 2022, there were 92 million subscribers to streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music, according to the RIAA. In total, 214 million Americans — 75% of the population 12 and older — streamed music in the past month, according to a January 2023 survey by Edison Research. Younger consumers were far more likely to stream music than older listeners, however, with 53% of people over the age of 55 having done so compared to 89% of 12-to-34-year-olds and 85% of 35-to-54-year-olds. A good classical music app can help narrow that sizable gap, attract more subscribers and generate more subscription revenue.
Going after classical music fans makes financial sense, too. For starters, they’re plentiful, says Russ Crupnick, partner at market research firm MusicWatch. “By comparison, they are somewhat larger than the entire population of vinyl buyers,” he says. As older consumers, they can afford a standalone classical music app: Crupnick says classical music fans’ mean income is 35% higher than average. They’re also twice as likely to purchase expensive, audiophile stereo equipment. When asked if obtaining the highest-quality sound format is important, 64% of classical music fans said yes, and 54% are willing to pay more to get it. Fortunately for them, Apple Music Classical is free of charge to Apple Music subscribers. “It will be interesting to see whether Apple eventually adds fees to monetize the service, or subsidizes it as they have higher resolution audio,” says Crupnick.
There’s great potential outside of the United States, too. Apple Music Classical will eventually be available in three strong markets for classical music: Japan, China and South Korea. In China, the fifth-largest recorded music market in 2022, according to the IFPI, classical music has been a phenomenon since the Cultural Revolution. Gramophone magazine described it as a “gargantuan market for the consumption of recorded classical music even if only as a study aid or as a residue of having Mozart and Beethoven sonatas tinkling through the family home.”
The digital market has performed incredibly well without a mass appeal offering tailored for classical music fans. Record labels generated $16.9 billion from streaming in 2022 while mostly ignoring an important subset of the market. With Apple Music Classical, Idagio and Stage+ super-serving classical music fans, there’s potential to do better.
Apple Music is ready for its long-awaited dive into classical music, with a standalone app. Announced Thursday (March 9), Apple Music Classical is pitched as the “ultimate classical experience,” and is said to be years in the making.
The app will invite classical fans to stream hundreds of curated playlists and thousands of exclusive albums, plus view exclusive artworks and digital portraits, browse composer biographies, editorial notes and more. AMC launches on March 28 but is available to “pre-order” now in the App Store.
Apple Music subscribers will be able download and use Apple Music Classical at no additional cost to their plan. While it’ll be a standalone app, only Apple Music subscribers will have access to it.
At launch, the service will boast the world’s “largest classical music catalog” with over 5 million tracks and works from new releases to recognized masterpieces, according to a statement.
The app’s search engine can locate recordings by composer, work, conductor, and even catalog number, and audiophiles will be rewarded with “thousands” of recordings rendered in immersive spatial audio.
Apple’s full-on plunge into classical follows the tech giant’s acquisition of Primephonic, the Netherlands-based classical music streaming service, in a deal announced back in Aug. 30, 2021, a precursor to the launch of a dedicated experience for classical music fans, which was tentatively planned for 2022.
“We love and have a deep respect for classical music, and Primephonic has become a fan favorite for classical enthusiasts,” Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats, said at the time. “Together, we’re bringing great new classical features to Apple Music, and in the near future, we’ll deliver a dedicated classical experience that will truly be the best in the world.”
That dedicated classical experience is set to go live later this month everywhere where Apple Music is offered, with the exception of China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan; those regions will follow at an unspecified date, reads a corporate statement. Also coming soon is Apple Music Classical for Android.
The app will be available for all iPhone models running iOS 15.4 or later.
Apple on Thursday posted its first quarterly revenue drop in nearly four years after pandemic-driven restrictions on its China factories curtailed sales of the latest iPhone during the holiday season. The company’s sales of $117 billion for the October-December period represented a 5% decline from the same time in the previous year, a deeper downturn than analysts had projected.
Despite the downturn — which marks Apple’s first year-over-year decrease in quarterly revenue since the January-March period in 2019 when sales also slipped 5% — the company’s Apple Services division actually set a new revenue record. The company said that combined, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade and others generated $20.8 billion for the three months ending Dec. 31, up from up from $19.5 billion a year earlier. Apple said that it now has more than 935 million paid subscriptions across its services, up from more than 900 million paid subscriptions reported in the previous quarter.
Apple’s profit also eroded during the past quarter, even though the Cupertino, California, company remained a pillar of prosperity. Earnings totaled $30 billion, or $1.88 per share, a 13 decrease from the same time in the previous year. Those results also missed a target of $1.94 per share set by analysts polled by FactSet Research.
Investors reacted to the letdown by initially driving down Apple’s stock by nearly 5% in Thursday’s extended trading. But management remarks made during a conference call with analysts raised hopes that Apple’s disappointing performance may have been a mere hiccup, paring the decrease in the company’s shares to less than 1%.
Apple’s rare stumble came against a backdrop of renewed investor optimism about tech’s outlook for this year, helping to spur a 17% increase in the sector’s bellwether Nasdaq composite index so far this year.
But now Wall Street seems likely to reassess things in light of Apple’s latest results and ongoing worries about a potential recession in the wake of rising interest rates aimed at tamping down inflation, said Investing.com analyst Jesse Cohen.
With Google also disclosing a year-over-year quarterly decline in its digital ad sales on Thursday alongside Apple’s disappointing performance, Cohen said it’s clear there are “several challenges the tech sector faces amid the current economic climate of slowing growth and elevated inflation.”
Despite the quarterly downturn in its fortunes. Apple hasn’t signaled any intention to resort to mass layoffs — a stark contrast to its peers in technology. Industry giants Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta Platforms have announced plans to jettison more than a combined 50,000 employees as they adjust to revenue slowdowns or downturns caused by people’s lessening dependence on the digital realm as the pandemic has eased.
“We manage for the long term,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts during the conference call. “We invest in innovation and people.”
Cook had tried to brace investors for tougher sledding in late October when he warned of “increasingly difficult economic conditions” heading into the holiday season. Then, just a few days later, Apple cautioned that China’s attempts to clamp down on the spread of COVID was affecting its production lines and would prevent meeting all the demand for the premium iPhone 14 models during the holidays.
That contributed to an 8% decrease in iPhone sales from the previous year to $65.8 billion in the most recent quarter.
Cook indicated Apple’s supply headaches are now over, assuring analysts that “production is now back where we want it to be.”
In another positive sign, Apple also disclosed that it now has more than 2 billion iPhones, iPads, Macs and other devices in active use for the first time. That is likely to help Apple sell more digital subscriptions and ads, helping to fuel long-term revenue growth.
