Tech

‘Apple Music for Artists’ debuts as a new analytics dashboard for musicians

Published

7 years ago

January 22, 2018

Apple has released a new dashboard specifically for musicians called Apple Music for Artists. The new dashboard has been created to give “deep analytical insight” about fans’ buying and listening habits.

First reported by Billboard, Apple is releasing the new feature to “a few thousand” artists as a beta feature today, with what looks like a full rollout to all artists sometime this spring.

Billboard got an early look at the dashboard and notes the clean and simple interface (see above) that is easy to use.

The easily navigable dashboard’s home page provides artists with their current number of plays, spins, song purchases and album purchases. The user can specify the time period ranging from the past 24 hours to the 2015 launch of Apple Music.

This reminds us of the dashboard offered to publishers for the Apple News platform, although it looks like Apple Music for Artists may be even more feature rich. Artists will be able to slice up and analyze data in a host of ways, including a global map, age, sex, and more.

They may further examine the listener demographics per city, for example, calling up how many times females ages 16-24 in Los Angeles have listened to a particular song.

Another nice feature is allowing artists to see data on their tracks that are included in Apple-curated playlists.

While this new tool will be popular with all musicians who have their content on Apple Music, the company thinks it will be particularly helpful for indie artists.

“As a truly independent artist with a small team, music analytics is something we can’t do without. We don’t have the luxury of deep major label market research to rely on to help us make important decisions like where to perform and how to advertise the things that we make,” says Canadian R&B singer Daniel Caesar, who was one of several artists consulted during the build-out.

One valuable use case is using location based listener data to help artists plan tour stops. While Apple is a couple years behind Spotify and Pandora when it comes to an analytics tool like this, Apple Musiconly launched back in 2015.

Tech

Verizon unlimited subscribers get permanent Apple Music access

Published

6 years ago

January 16, 2019

Montez French

Last year, Verizon (which owns Engadget’s parent company) offeredunlimited subscribers six months of free access to Apple Music. Now the carrier is expanding that partnership and officially bundling Beyond Unlimited and Above Unlimited subscriptions with the service. Starting on January 17th, all new and existing customers will be able to enjoy Apple Music at no additional cost. So, those who took advantage of the offer last year will be able to continue accessing the streaming service without having to pay its $10-a-month fee.

According to Verizon VP of Marketing Angie Klein, the company is expanding its partnership with Apple Music, because the original 6-month offer was a hit with customers. Unfortunately, only two out of three unlimited plans are getting Apple Music as a permanent perk. Its cheapest option, Go Unlimited, will still come bundled with free access to the service, but only for six months.

Style

Facebook Launches ‘Watch Parties’ to Binge Videos With Your Friends

Published

6 years ago

July 26, 2018

Montez French

Facebook is throwing a video party. Starting today. For everyone.

The social network is launching a new way to have groups of people who may be scattered across the country of globe watch videos together in real time, and comment on them. Unlike many Facebook launches, this will be available to all members today, as long as they are part of a group. It will roll out to other parts of Facebook within a few weeks, the company says.

Viewing video together is something “people do in real life,” says Fidji Simo, Facebook’s vice president of product. “They watch together. We see this as another way to connect people.”

Any kind of videos on Facebook can be viewed–from live broadcasts to funny viral cat videos, says Simo.

Business

Netflix Planning Ultra Subscription Price Increase

Published

6 years ago

July 9, 2018

HM staff writer

With Netflix planning to spend $8 billion on original content for 700 shows and movies, the streaming giant is looking to expand its current subscription plans. Netflix is reportedly planning a new Ultra tier, which would end up increasing the current $13.99 premium option to $16.99.

Under the new plan, Premium users would still keep Ultra High-Definition streaming and up to 4 users streaming at once; but would lose HDR content to Ultra plans. It’s unclear when this plan will be available to the masses, but Netflix is currently testing it out in several international countries.