The long-awaited launch of the music streaming service backed by Dr Dre, Jimmy Iovine, Trent Reznor and Ian Rogers has almost arrived.
Beats Music will go live in the United States on 21 January, 2014, complete with a free trial period that'll allow people to sample the service before opening their wallet. After the trial period it'll cost $10 per month.
Access will be through a web app on desktop, and iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps on mobile. The catalogue has more than 20 million songs, but the big push for the service is in curation - and human curation in particular.
Services like Pandora and Spotify depend on algorithms based on "other people who listened to that also listened to this" to recommend content to their users, but Beats will rely instead on a team of music experts that include radio programmers, A&R directors, music writers, and bloggers. There'll be playlists included from the likes of Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, DJ Magazine and various others.
This will manifest itself in four ways for the user. A "just for you" selection of albums and playlists delivered "at least four times a day" based on their musical preferences, activity, time of day and "additional cultural and contextual clues", a "right now" continuous playlist based on a user's answers to four questions about their location, activity, surroundings and musical preferences, a "highlights" list of staff-recommended playlists and albums, and a more traditional browsing function that lets you find playlists and songs by genre, activity or curator. The ability to download tracks to listen to offline will also be included.
That sounds a bit overwhelming on paper, so it'll be interesting to see how it manifests itself at launch. Hopefully some of that complexity will be hidden from the user. Jimmy Iovine said: "Popular music is created in bite size pieces, one song at a time -- but most people need more than four minutes to be truly satisfied. It takes a highly curated, uninterrupted sequence of songs to achieve a fulfilling music experience, where the only song as important as the song you are listening to is the song that comes next."
One interesting thing is that the royalty rates are flat -- meaning that every artist from the biggest to the smallest will earn the same amount for their catalogue. It's likely hoped that this will head of criticism from a vocal minority of musicians who argue that streaming services don't pay new bands enough. "Beats Music is based on the belief that all music has value and this concept was instilled in every step of its development. We want it to be just as meaningful for artists as it is for fans," said Trent Reznor, who serves as Beats Music Chief Creative Officer. "We're committed to providing revenue to artists, while helping to strengthen the connection with their fans."
Beats Music will be arriving in the United States on 21 January 2014. A wider launch has not yet been announced.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
