More radio, more live: where Apple Music's headed in 2020

The future of music streaming is radio, but not as we know it. Here's what next for Apple Music, according to Oliver Schusser and Zane Lowe

There’s a club that’s open strictly from 9pm until midnight. It’s called Out Now. “At the front of the queue to get in, you’ve got Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Calvin Harris. The queue is getting bigger and bigger – it’s snaking round the block, and all the new artists are right at the back.”

Out Now is a hypothetical club, but the point that Zane Lowe, the DJ, creative director of Apple’s radio station Beats 1 and now global head of artist relations for Apple Music, is making is that, in the music industry, it’s difficult to stand out enough to get through the door – and “when you get inside, it’s full”.

Beats 1 went on air in 2015 and is accessible round the clock through iTunes and Apple Music. What Lowe has done with the platform is to essentially give musicians their own "clubs", in the form of freeform radio shows. Four years in, the station has graduated to a full-on scene, first under the stewardship of producer and Beats Electronics co-founder Jimmy Iovine, and now under Oliver Schusser, the current head of Apple Music. “Whenever Nicki Minaj does a Queen Radio show, she’s number one trending on Twitter,” says Schusser.

There’s still a lot of people who don’t know about Apple’s radio endeavours, some locked into the catalogue and convenience of Spotify. Zane Lowe might have the music industry’s hottest contacts book but Spotify is still the go-to music streaming service in Europe, with 83.5 million monthly active users as of June this year. Apple Music has grown quickly, particularly in the US, to 60 million subscribers worldwide, as of June 2019, but even that makes it, for once, an underdog. So what’s next for Apple Music?

Apple doesn’t break out Beats 1 monthly listening figures; various commentators have speculated they are relatively low, the official line is “tens of millions”. What we do know is that one of Lowe’s priorities is to merge the two elements of Apple's £9.99 a month Music offering: its Spotify-style streaming service and the Beats 1 radio shows.

“I want more people to listen and discover this stuff,” says Lowe. “And I want to integrate what we do at Beats 1 into Apple Music more thoroughly. I would guess there are still subscribers who don’t realise Elton John has done over 200 shows. Those shows are works of art in their own right.”

This project starts with rebranding some of Apple Music’s most popular streaming playlists which Schusser says the team has spent the last six to twelve months developing. What was “A-List Hip Hop” has become “Agenda” in the UK, and “Rap Life” in the US, for example – and the plan is to build more dedicated shows around them: “You’ll see more shows based on our top playlists.”

The idea is also to amplify what Apple thinks no-one is doing with Lowe promising “some big new names” for Beats 1 hosts, alongside lead DJs Julie Adenuga and Ebro Darden, in the next few months. What’s interesting is that Beats 1 is now documenting the creative process in real time, with Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig discussing the album Father of the Bride pre- and post-launch on his twice monthly Time Crisis show. Lowe would argue that the shows are even interacting with the music that’s produced by these artists. “Q Tip has a selection of beats and sounds he drops in and that’s how you know you’re listening to his show,” he says. “Then I listened to the last A Tribe Called Quest album and it sounded like Abstract Radio. I felt so stoked when I realised that.”

It’s a good time to be a music superfan then, with Apple Music wooing with its audio take on liner notes and Spotify’s Fans First scheme offering first refusal on gig tickets for hardcore listeners. What’s next for music streaming services is, in a sense, about everything except the vanilla music streaming.

One area still in flux is events. Spotify has already produced live music events based around some of its top playlists, such as the Who We Be festival-style concert series held in partnership with Live Nation. Meanwhile, Apple has put on gigs for emerging musicians in stores throughout 2019, and Schusser says the company wants to do more live events in the next 12 months. While there are no official plans for a relaunch, he says, “We never retired the iTunes Festival. We paused it.”

There’s also the matter of how livestreams fit into the picture. After events with Shawn Mendes, French rap group PNL and Tyler the Creator, who did a live performance of his album IGOR, streamed on Apple Music the night before it came out, Lowe says “live music is definitely on the horizon” for the service. It’s all part of the team’s bid to “eventise” – his word – album launches. In the case of Tyler the Creator, “fans can tune in, then after watching it maybe you go to the album.”

When it comes to someone like Billie Eilish, who now has her own Beats 1 show, the Apple Music team realised that their pre-adds, which allow users to register their interest in an album before it’s out, had made people more invested in her March 2019 album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

It turns out users are four times more likely to complete an album if they’d pre-added it to their collection, 1.5 times more likely to listen to it again and they listen to music four times longer than other Apple Music subscribers. In short, Apple is trying to build a better hype machine than its rivals to counteract the popular, but depersonalised playlists that have come to dominate music streaming.

Apple’s self-proclaimed “artist first” strategy is at odds with Spotify’s “fan first” marketing but both are vying to make their platforms more amenable to anyone outside the big names. So Apple Music for Artists has come out of beta, sharing data on iTunes, Apple Music and Shazam activity and competing with Spotify for Artists. “We think artists should get paid,” says Schusser, “and we’re adding more credits to songwriters, not just artists. We think the decision not to do a free tier has really paid off, after four years. We don't think music should be free.”

That said, data from music analytics firm BuzzAngle shows the top 25 artists accounted for 11 per cent of total streams in the US in 2018, and artists still need hundreds of thousands of plays a month to start making the equivalent of minimum wage. In Digital Music News’ December 2018 analysis of streaming service payouts, it found that Pandora pays the highest royalty rates with Apple Music in third place with an estimated $0.00735 per stream, ahead of Spotify at an estimated $0.00437 a stream, which has at least been moving in the right direction in recent years.

In probably the most bizarre example of Apple spending to get the experience right, Schusser says that Apple has “a team of people listening to music and transcribing the lyrics” to ensure they're accurate enough for Apple Music’s new time synced lyrics feature; “we don’t get them from the usual sites.”

Spotify aside, Apple Music isn’t quite all things to all music fans yet. The version for web browsers, which went live in September alongside the existing iOS and Android apps, could expand its appeal but Soundcloud’s role as a launching pad for less well-known acts seems safe for now, and YouTube Music has found a niche in live performances and music video playlists. French service Qobuz claims to have 32 million subscribers to its hi-res, 24-bit catalogue in the US; its success could push Apple and Spotify further on high quality audio.

With the so-called ‘death of iTunes’ this September, Schusser is trying to cater to both people who made their music collection a labour of love and those who have grown up with streaming. “We like the album, we think someone's spent 18 months to two years on it,” he says. “I love radio but we don't want Apple Music to be radio. We don't want it to be one long stream.”

This article was originally published by WIRED UK