Beats Music launches

Whenever a brand like Beats lends their name to or builds a service like this with a much hyped press launch I feel like it's almost always doomed. I tried my account this morning and that's probably the end. It's just another streaming radio app, nothing at all new. Their entire value claim is based around the idea that not just an algorithm is picking the music, humans are involved too. That's great, who cares? Humans are already involved for the other radio apps, maybe not special "music experts" but direct plays on Spotify are certainly factored into their radio algorithm. In fact it's more democratized that way. This needed to be magnitudes better than Pandora, Spotify radio and iTunes Radio to get anyone to care once the press goes away, it does not appear that is the case. I will be impressed if anyone is still talking about this in 3 months.

their tagline/value statement is weaksauce: "A NEW MUSIC SERVICE CURATED BY PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE MUSIC IS EMOTION AND LIFE." who gives a shit?

I like the big "HOME.HERO.HEADING" at the top. And "HOME.WHATEVER.HEADING" is quite amusing...

I don't disagree with that. The brand is huge and will find a way to at least keep the lights on here but how many people are really going to decide to spend their $9.99 a month on this? Most people won't even pay Spotify $9.99 a month for radio and a virtually unlimited music library since oh yea it's all also available for free.

I've been using this for the last 4 or 5 hours. I'm not in the US but have a dormant US iTunes Account so I was able to download it through that.

Design: Really slick. I like the Rdio app but recently it's been getting a bit confusing. I've always hated the Spotify app even though I was a paying customer since it first arrived in the UK. The Beats app admittedly has a lot going on but I found it pretty easy to navigate and the artist page layout is quite nice.

Features: The artist page actually recommends playlists to help you get introduced to a new artist or the 'deep cuts' of an artist you already know which I find quite nice.

Creating playlists is simple and unlike Spotify you can set a cover image and a description.

The sentence based playlist feature (mad libs for music) works ok. It hasn't thrown up anything completely wrong and I expect it'll get better over time.

The home page is kind of the best part of the app. It presents you with albums and playlists you might like and seems pretty good at recommending stuff.

Overall I think they have two things up on everyone else: design and playlists. On Spotify and Rdio finding good playlists is difficult. Spotify has been getting better at this but it isn't great yet. Beats seems to have spent a lot of time crafting A LOT of really great playlists and they seem to be where I'm spending most of my time. The human curation thing seems to have worked.

At this point it's hard to tell who'll come out ahead. Beats is ad-free but subscription only. If they can convince people to pay for it (and I think they might be able to through brand power/marketing) I think it'll be a good thing for artists and might take away some of the stigma streaming music services have with them. I think I'm going to continue using it as my main service but at the moment I don't know how they will charge for it. It comes with a 7 day free trial. Currently it's pretty easy to get around the US only limitations but if their payment system restricts sales to US addresses I won't be able to use it until it expands to the UK.