Apple Music launches tomorrow

Life

Apple Music. Image: Apple

As Apple Music’s first day approaches on 30 June, we’re learning a bit more about the details of the launch, and of the service itself.

As MacRumors reports, Apple Music senior director Ian Rogers wrote on his blog that Apple Music and the required iOS 8.4 update will become available starting at 8am Pacific time (4pm Irish time) on Tuesday, with Beats One programming beginning an hour later. Rogers later edited his post to remove any mention of a launch time, but he also mentioned an 8am start time in a Tweet from Saturday.

All told, it’s probably safe to assume that Apple’s goal is to begin programming at that time, though whether it actually does may depend on whether it runs into any technical difficulties as if flips the proverbial switch.

But launch details aren’t the only thing we’ve learned – iTunes Match and Apple Music’s song-matching service will also get a nice upgrade in the not-too-distant future. In an exchange on Twitter, Apple executive Eddy Cue said that Apple Music’s matching service will start with a limit of 25,000 matched songs, but that the company is “working to get to 100k for iOS 9”.

This means if you have music in your iTunes library that isn’t available in Apple Music, you’ll be able to upload it to your account and then stream it (or redownload it) to any of your devices. Customers who aren’t interested in Apple Music’s streaming catalog could keep paying €25 per year for iTunes Match, but if you already get iTunes Match but you’d also like to join Apple Music, it seems that you can drop the iTunes Match subscription and still be able to upload 25,000 of your own songs.

A larger upload limit will be a welcome change too. Google Play Music, for example, lets you upload 50,000 tracks.

Cue also confirmed that current Beats Music subscribers would be able to transfer their accounts to Apple Music, via an updated Beats Music app. And he told another Twitter user that developers running betas of iOS 9 would be able to use Apple Music once they installed a new, forthcoming seed.

Macworld

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