iTunes-Beats Music

Streaming is undoubtedly the future of music, and I think Apple knows this. That's why they bought Beats Music, and that's why we keep hearing rumors about it being included in iTunes soon.

I just don't think they understand why streaming is so popular.

Spotify has 30 million active users, which definitely indicates interest in streaming. But only 10 million are paying users. That means 2/3 of Spotify users are only utilizing the free, as supported version.

Along the same lines, Pandora is the most popular music streaming service (although they legally count as a radio service when it comes to paying musicians…), and this is due to the free nature of it as well.

But the rumors for Apple's Beats Music integration in iTunes have it pegged at being $7.99 a month.

I have two issues with this. One, it's not going to gain much increased traction at that price, because people stream mostly because they dislike paying for music. I get that they want to (need to) make sure that artists are getting fairly compensated for their music, and they don't want to bleed music like Spotify, but I'm just not sure it's going to work. Two, I can still get Spotify Premium on education pricing for $4.99 a month. Is Apple going to have a $3.99 education discount? It's doubtful.

The only solution I could see working for a paid subscription that would actually be relatively popular is having the cost of entry be $7.99/month or purchase of an album on iTunes per month. This method then appeals to users because they get an album even after they stop having a subscription to the service. This keeps iTunes afloat, download numbers up, music rights holders happy, and users satisfied in their expenditure.

Let me know what you think in the comments. 

Thoughts on Galaxy S6 Rumors

Rumors are finally rampant regarding Samsung's next flagship phone. The three main rumors are that it will have (some varying degree of) a special, curved display, cleaner software, and a housebuilt processor. Here are my thoughts about it.

Lots of people are pointing to the Galaxy S6 coming in an edge variant, not unlike the Note Edge that was released in the fall. Some suggest that the main S6 will have two curves on it, covering both the left and right sides. Others, however, are suggesting that Samsung will look to mimic YotaPhone and put a screen on the back of the phone as well as a curve on the side.

If Samsung decides to put curved displays on the Galaxy S6, I will not be terribly impressed. It'd be yet another use impaired gimmick from the king of gimmicks, which is exactly what they don't need right now. But, if they do decide to go the way of the YotaPhone, they could create a really compelling success. The dual screen display could be useful, if implemented well, and Samsung is probably the only major company that could actually succeed in the implementation of this idea.

Will Samsung drop TouchWiz in the Galaxy S6? If so, would their phone be compelling? There is certainly a huge market for stock Android on more phones, particularly Samsung phones, but I'm not sure that I believe Samsung would be willing to do this. Also, most mainstream users actually like Samsung's TouchWiz, so I'm not entirely sure that it's a good idea to get rid of it.

Samsung is rumored to be using a home brewed processor instead of a Snapdragon. This would essentially knock us back to the pre-2013 Android roots of a dysfunctional app store where nothing was universal. This is a bad thing. Snapdragon is the reason for so much success in Android recently.

I remember the days when Android apps weren't universal in any definition of the term. Trying to download anything was a nightmare, because it was almost always guaranteed to not support my processor. The beauty of the dominance of Snapdragon processors is that recently, apps have run basically universally on all ~2013 and later devices. This is one of the biggest advantages of competing platforms: if you can download it, it runs. Dividing the ecosystem is a bad move, even if Samsung has the biggest market share in US Android.

In the end, I think the Galaxy S6 is going to be a really telling device for Android going forward. It may start a trend, and change the entire mobile industry, or it may create division within Android, rotting away the ecosystem, or it could totally flop and kill Samsung. We'll see what happens.