Dubai: Apple’s new music streaming service — Apple Music — is cheaper in the UAE than in the US but without the Beats 1 radio, a curated service headed up by some of the top DJs.
The streaming service is available in four Gulf countries — the UAE, Saudi, Oman and Bahrain.
The US company is offering Apple Music service free for three months, and after that it will cost Dh19.99 a month ($9.99 in the US) for an individual. The family plan is available for Dh29.99 ($14.99 in the US) a month. Up to six people can enjoy unlimited access to Apple Music on their devices — iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. Apple Music is coming to Apple TV and Android this fall.
“Apple enters a market that is already highly competitive and where there is little room for differentiation. It is also a market in which no player has managed to build a subscriber base that is too large for Apple to challenge,” Nadeem Khanzadah, head of omnichannel retail at Jumbo Group, told Gulf News.
Rival streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora have been notably absent from the Middle East market.
With the space for Apple users in the Middle East so high, Khanzadah sees the service as a “game changer” for the music industry. It will have a positive impact.
“This is another first from Apple, in terms of order rather than concept. Apple has a huge advantage of large base of customers — the service gets pushed to your device as an upgrade to iOS. By making it free for the first three months, they are inducing trial. Any marketer would tell you that is the first step to acquiring a customer,” said Sukhdev Singh, vice-president at market research and analysis services provider AMRB.
He said that streaming music has been available for a while, but what Apple is trying to do is what it did with music retailing when it launched iTunes a decade back. It was first time in history that listeners had a choice to buy music al-a-carte, indeed a revolutionary idea.
Over the years, he said that many people have migrated to streaming music which was enabled by tonnes of online content, reliable and faster net connectivity and evolved devices — both the music players and headsets.
“Apple is trying to enter that bigger market, and apparently one with far bigger potential to grow. You pay just about Dh20 a month to get access to a huge music library which Apple claims to have more than 30 million songs,” he said.
However, since the subscription price is not uniform across countries, Singh expects lot of expatriates in the UAE preferring to sign in from their home countries.
For example, the subscription for an Indian store user is just about Rs120 (Dh7) a month for individual users and Rs180 for families, about half the UAE price and Beats 1 Radio is also available.
Connect, a new feature of Apple music, promises to connect artists to their audiences directly. This could be a “huge push to young and not so famous artists” as they can directly connect with their fans. Given that fact that Middle East region is home to such great music talent, Singh said: “I see this would help the industry a lot in Middle East region. The feature also gives freedom to fans to follow their artists to know what they are coming up with.”
Apple music is likely to learn your taste basis what you have bought in the past. But if you are more of ‘streaming’ type music listener, it might not be able to learn your taste right from the word go. So, more you listen smarter it would guess to know what you like. Apple claims that what is recommended to you is not based on algorithms but recommended by real people with deep understanding and taste for music.
“If Apple Music is a success, which it most likely would be, it will worry the traditional music companies a lot. With such a huge user base, Apple would have a huge negotiation advantage over them. It might force competition to come with their own similar services over next few months,” he added.
The service was launched in over 100 countries with iOS 8.4 update, which also includes a new app.
