Apple Music rolled out a new feature comprising ‘Top 100’ charts on Friday. To be precise, the company released 116 ‘Top 100’ music charts – one global and rest of them are for each nation where Apple’s music streaming service is available.
So, if the Apple Music subscribers travel from one nation to another, they can now easily get to know which top music the country people are listening to.
New Feature of Apple Music
Apple Music, in a software upgrade, showcases the 116 ‘Top 100’ music charts under the tab ‘Browse’. The appearance of these charts is similar to that of a regular playlist or album, both on laptop and mobile.
Moreover, the upgraded version of Apple Music displays the lists of top 100 streamed songs of all the regions it is present, irrespective of from which location the music app is opened. The feature will subsequently allow subscribers to discover the popular music of diverse regions and one can follow, stream or download any of the playlists.
Apple will update the list once each day at 12:00 am PST, as reported first by RollingStone.
At the same time, the company also made few changes to artists’ listings and categories with the software upgrade, cited Verge. In the earlier version, singles, collections and studio albums of a single artist were put together, making it difficult to identify/search that artist’s most popular songs. But now, there is a separate tab for studio albums, live albums, singles/EP, along with an all-new category – Essential Albums featuring prominent an artist’s most famous songs.
Apple released 116 ‘Top 100’ charts – one global and rest of them are for each nation where Apple Music is available. Source: Apple Music Screenshot
Apple Music Subscription Plans
With the rise in consumption of digital music services, Apple launched its music streaming app in 2015. After three months of free trial, listeners can subscribe to Apple Music for $9.99 per month/user, while a family subscription plan is available for $14.99 per month supporting 6 people. Besides this, there is another student plan costing $4.99 monthly.
Apple Music streams ad-free music videos and audios and currently encompasses a library of over 45 million songs. The innovation giant, however, is facing a tough competition in the music streaming service industry. Even with 50 million subscribers (as reported in May 2018), it still lags far behind Spotify with over 75 million subscribers, as announced in April 2018, and YouTube in terms of favoritism.
Music Industry in the US
Meanwhile, the US music streaming industry is going through a transformation phase.
In June this year, Billboard, the company publishing a collection of top 100 songs and albums for the US music industry changed its algorithm for ranking various music genres. After facing a lot of criticism, it has started now weighing paid streams higher than the free streams. Even then, though this step met a plenty of approvals, it equally received negative comments.
Similarly, YouTube in May revamped its entire platform by launching a new dedicated music app, YouTube Music and rebranding YouTube Red as YouTube Premium.
Audius, another music streaming service platform took initiative to integrate blockchain in the music industry to reclaim value for audio creators and listeners.
Apple in June introduced a browser extension for web player, offering desktop subscribers another mode of listening to their favorite music than the iTunes only. A month later on, it facilitated users to set up a listening mix in the music app that accumulates the top 25 songs their Apple Music friends are streaming.
