Apple Music Connect, the experiment

Federico Viticci of MacStories wrote this yesterday and it got me thinking about Apple Music Connect, which I’ve started to check daily:

The responses to this tweet are varied, but they generally echo the sentiment that I’ve been seeing in music industry writing: it’s largely doomed to fail. The UX is somewhat crap (not denying this) and the positioning is unclear (also not denying this). I’m sure Apple will work on this over time, but it’s hard to convert users if they start off with a bad first impression (hey, iTunes Ping / Tidal / any other music network that fails to catch on).

But we shouldn’t be surprised that Apple Music Connect is adopting slowly. For major artists, their labels (or the artists themselves) have already bought into another streaming service - most of the majors into Spotify, and the dozen-or-so upper-echelon folks who co-sponsored Tidal - so why should we expect them to suddenly release a single on Apple Music Connect for the sake of their fans? Fans by nature are rabid, so they’ll follow you to whichever network you choose (this is why Tidal didn’t die on arrival). What’s the incentive for Kanye West to post his new stuff on Apple Music?

SoundCloud is in a weird spot in that it has the adoption of millions (including Europe and Asia, perhaps most importantly), but isn’t necessarily tied directly to labels. In other words, there’s no incentive for Kanye West to NOT post new music on SoundCloud - no conflict of interest, no problem. That said, the network’s moves to partner with brands is probably causing other strings to pull artists toward it. The general public will probably never know the full scope of it, but it’s worth assuming that major artists are probably picking their music networks of choice very strategically.

But Apple Music (and more specifically, Connect) is not going to pick up like this, with the exception of a few possible artists with existing partnerships with Apple (read: Trent Reznor, Dr. Dre, Adele & Coldplay)[^3]. And I’m fine with that: it’s not done. Apple admitted that they still have work to do. Anyone who’s tried to build or work at a startup knows the difficulty in launching a good MVP quickly. While we instinctively seem to hold Apple to a higher standard given their massive stack of cash, you can’t blame them for putting out a brand-new streaming music service and wanting to iterate & experiment. I’ll be a contrarian: I love the idea of integrating streaming & social music discovery within the existing music player. Why not talk about music in the same app that you listen to music? Sure, it may look cluttered due to “bad UX” and purposeless due to low adoption, but it’s an interesting approach at trying to bring the relationship between artist and listener closer to the music itself that establishes that relationship in the first place. That’s a pretty massive and difficult concept to get right, so I can’t be surprised that it’s a little messy the first go-around.

Any new, minimum-viable product requires iteration and experimentation. No matter what they say in PR announcements, Apple has to be trying to experiment with Connect. You can’t write a music product off immediately when artists don’t flock to it immediately; great things take time to get right.

Posted on October 20, 2015