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Pretty Good Hat

A couple more Apple Music notes

Last year I made a few totally uninformed notes about Apple’s purchase of Beats, which we now know is resulting in the upcoming Apple Music – a curated, streaming radio and music streaming service that looks functionally (so far) a lot like Rdio and Spotify.

I use Rdio a lot, and I was thinking while I was driving around this morning about a couple of things that I hope Apple Music eventually will offer. The first is a hook to last.fm to scrobble the songs I listen to. Last.fm has continued to be one of those services that I just keep using. I like being able to gets its view of my musical history, and I’ve also connected it to slogger, so I have an ongoing log in my Day One journal. I would miss not having that ongoing record.

Here’s the important one, though: Apple needs to realize, especially with their intent to launch an Android app, that their target customers are already using a streaming service, and they have to help them cross the river. They need to carefully consider the maturity of services that they’re competing with: If a Spotify friend posts a playlist, I can use re/spin to build the same playlist in Rdio. And if I’m to migrate outright from Rdio, how will Apple help me move my playlists, favorites, and collections? I hope for an API, because that will also help me get my last.fm hook. I guess we’ll have some idea in a few days. Fingers crossed.