Tomas Chlebek Various Apple employees have been speaking to the press quite a bit lately, the most recent being a designer Marc Newson and fitness expert Jay Blahnik. This time, Oliver Schusser, International Vice President of iTunes, spoke. With a British letter The Guardian he mainly talked about Apple Music.
The biggest events associated with Apple Music have been since its launch announcing the number of people using the trial version and the launch of the new album Dr. Dre, Compton. So far, both indicate that Apple will do at least quite well in the world of streaming services, and Schusser has not spared positive statements in relation to Apple Music Connect, a kind of social network used to connect artists directly with their audience: "Apple Music Connect is growing significantly with larger and larger the amount of artists connecting with their fans […].”
However, he went on to say, variations of which appear several more times in the article: "[…] we still have some homework left before the end of the year." The first instance of this is the comment about the arrival of Apple Music on Android, which should happen in the fall with , that Apple "still has some work" to complete before launch. The second is a reaction to the negative feedback from many users who complain about the complicated user interface and problems with their own music libraries.
[do action=”citation”]iTunes is still a big part of our business.[/do]
“The product is always our priority and we get a lot of feedback. Keep in mind that this was a big launch with 110 markets at once, so we have tons of feedback. Of course, we try to improve it every day," explains Schusser.
As for the aforementioned two big events, the announcement of 11 million people using the trial version of Apple Music it was hacked before long with speculation that nearly 48% of people setting that number have stopped using Apple Music. Although Apple countered this high number with its own, which was around 21%, Schusser himself refused to deal with these statistics further, saying that he and other Apple employees really want to focus on making the product as good as possible - their goals are therefore rather long-term and current statistics they are not very relevant to them.
Release of the album Compton by Dr. Dre on the other hand was a success without objection, when the songs on it were listened to 25 million times in the first week on Apple Music, but at the same time recorded half a million downloads on iTunes. Oliver Schusser sees this as evidence that streaming won't have a significant negative impact on music purchases, at least digitally: “If you follow the industry and look at the numbers, the download business is very, very healthy. iTunes is still a big part of our business and will continue to be, so we're devoting the same amount of time and energy to it.”
Ultimately, the most distinctive part of Apple Music remains the hand-curated playlists focused on discovering new music. At the same time, independent record companies are worried about the growth of interest in this type of playlists, because while currently a significant part of them is determined by the music produced by independent record companies, a greater interest in them can also be caused by a greater influence of large record companies, which currently control a large part of commercial radio. Schusser dismissed these concerns by stating, “We like independent artists as well as major label artists. Small and big artists. When you turn on Beats 1 and calculate the ratio of major label artists to indie artists, it's the place to discover new music from any label.”
