Roger Fingas
Rdio on Friday responded to this week's announcement of Apple Music, satirizing Apple marketing from 1981 as part of an argument that the company is doing nothing fundamentally new.
"Welcome, Apple. Seriously. Welcome to the most exciting and important frontier since the digital music revolution began 16 years ago," Rdio said, according to The Next Web. The words paraphrase Apple's response to IBM putting out its first personal computer. IBM-compatible PCs would eventually come to dominate the global computer market.
Rdio CEO Anthony Bay reportedly argued that iTunes began "really clean and simple," but has "gotten messy" since, and that Apple Music could get lost in the shuffle for people navigating its content. "So you have Apple Music next to podcasts and e-books and 'rent a movie' and 'buy a TV show', plus your own music, there's a risk of it being very confusing," he said. The executive described Rdio as a specialty shop next to Apple's department store.
He further criticized the originality of Apple's efforts. "When you look at where Apple has done remarkable things, it's when they do something new: the original Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad - those are all 'wow'.
"This is not that. This is another version of music," Bay remarked.
He nevertheless suggested that there is room for many different streaming services, since they all share similar music libraries.
Apple announced Apple Music during Monday's WWDC keynote. The service will launch on June 30, and eventually come to 100 countries, more than Rdio's current 85 and Spotify's 50.
Christine McKee
Stephen Silver
Charles Martin
Amber Neely
103 Comments
He has a point. iTunes has certainly become bloated over the years and imo the store itself needs to have a separate app from a music/television/movies app.
Okay, well, enjoy bankruptcy. You and Spotify need to go.
1999: "Consumer-level laptop? Nothing new."
2007: "Smart phone? Nothing new."
2010: "Tablet? Nothing new."
2015: "Paid music streaming service? Nothing new."
What do you mean? This is completely new. This is the opportunity for us to rent music, and not have to be burdened with owning an actual copy of said music. Not only that, for our good money, they will compress this music for us, so that we don't have to listen to it in that CD quality we all hate. It's like radio, only you get to pay for it.
He has a point. iTunes has certainly become bloated over the years and imo the store itself needs to have a separate app from a music/television/movies app.
No, he doesn't have a point. He has thinking that's a decade old.
Nowhere in iOS is that true. He's still thinking with a desktop-centric model, and that's why he's wrong.