Apple is in talks to sign Toronto-born rapper Drake, hip-hop artist Pharrell Williams and electronic music DJ David Guetta as guest DJs for a revamped iTunes Radio, according to the New York Post. The report also claims that Apple continues to negotiate with record labels for Apple Music and wants to offer a three-month free trial period for the $10-a-month streaming music service.
Apple Music will reportedly combine the best features of Pandora, Spotify and YouTube into one service, including streaming music and video, artist pages, a YouTube-style sharing section called Apple Connect and a refreshed version of iTunes Radio. Apple also wanted to offer lyrics as part of the service, but does not want to pay extra to record labels to offer the feature.
Apple is expected to announce its new streaming music service on June 8 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, building upon the assets it acquired through its Beats Music purchase last year. The company will reportedly push customers to sign up for Apple Music by offering SoundCloud-like sharing, exclusive content and the aforementioned three-month free trial period.
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This could be one of the most exciting WWDC keynotes in many years.
There is good music and bad music. Whether one likes it or not is another matter.
"Animal music" huh? Just say what you'd really like to say, sir.
The only good rap songs to have ever been written were a few hits of the 80s performed by the Beastie Boys, Andrew Lloyd Webber (Starlight Express), the Rock Steady Crew and the like.
Since then, all we have had is thuggish animal music whose advocates were particularly prevalent during the Ferguson riots.
Apple aligning itself with violent thugs, sadly, doesn't surprise me these days. Let us all look forward to a time when rap and hippo-hop music is wiped off the face of the earth forever; that will be a great day for humanity and the fight against evil.
$10 a month streaming will, of course, be a failure. But Apple knows that; it hardly wants to kill its golden goose, iTunes. It's just a sop to current trends, like the Apple Watch. Wearables will soon revert to dismal failure. The great thing is, however, that tech will get cheaper, and, in the light of such failure, will be a boon to us all.