Apple’s much-anticipated WWDC 2015 conference began this morning and kicked off with the always popular keynote speech, where legions of Apple and iOS fans were greeted to the latest and greatest details coming to Apple’s operating systems. Among those details was the newly announced ‘Apple Music,’ which is by all accounts a competitor to Google’s Play Music Unlimited. The kicker, Apple will be launching Apple Music for Android users later on this year stating it will be available sometime this Fall. That means interested users will get their chance to see what Apple Music is all about sometime between September and November.
For all intents and purposes, Apple Music will serve as a main hub where music fans can go to find and access all of their music in one place. It lets users access any song in their currently existing library from purchased tracks through iTunes or from songs which have been ripped to iTunes via personally owned CD’s, but it will also allow access to a vast library of more than 30 million songs with optional human curated playlists should the user want them, as well as access to Apple’s new Apple Radio service named ‘Beats 1,’ which will be a live radio station which focuses heavily on live music and music culture. Beats 1 will be hosted by three different influential DJ’s from L.A., New York, and London and will provide listeners with streaming music live, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
The monthly service cost will be $9.99 a month so it isn’t unlike Google’s Play Music Unlimited. One area where it seems to pull ahead though is that it will give users a 90-day free trial of the service in which to test it out, after which the $9.99 monthly fee begins. This is in comparison to the 30 days free you get with Google Play Music Unlimited. How will the sound quality be? How will the library of music compare? These are unanswered questions and will remain that way since the service is not yet available even to iOS users, and won’t be available to Android users until this Fall, so Google may have some time to make any necessary changes to Play Music in efforts to keep users from switching. When Android users are able to test out Apple Music though, there are more than a few compelling reasons to do so.