It’s been a long time in the making but Apple has started working on its own music streaming service with the help of Beats and their chief creative officer and Nine Inch Nails frontman, Trent Reznor.
It has been almost a year since Apple drew the headlines following its US$3bn purchase of Beats to not only bolster its music hardware, but also develop a music streaming service to compete with Spotify, Deezer and Google Play Music.
Apple has already attempted to woo music labels to their own concept of a music streaming service, but had failed in this attempt after it attempted to convince them to lower their licencing agreement costs so as to under-cut the price of other streaming services – US$8 per month instead of US$10 per month.
According to The New York Times, not only will there be a future launch of the music streaming service, but Beats’ engineers will help Apple develop iTunes Radio that will develop a much more catered service depending on where the user is in the world which could even include exclusive album launches only available through the Apple service.
In the meantime however, Reznor is one of the big-ticket items in Beats who has been given the challenge, along with Beats founder Jimmy Iovine, of transforming Apple’s Music app which has for so long been the home of both iTunes downloaded music and people’s own music collections.
The most likely outcome, according to those in the know, is that Apple’s streaming service will be integrated into Music with a heavy emphasis on new visuals and curated playlists.
All of these details and other developments Beats have made within Apple’s music ecosystem are due to be revealed later in June this year, but the actual release of the new service is not expected until later this year when it is launched as part of the new iOS platform, currently codenamed ‘Copper’.
Apple and Beats image via Kārlis Dambrāns/Flickr
