Apple recently launched Apple Music and new mobile software aimed at enhancing user experience while limiting data sharing with marketers, creating challenges for advertising opportunities. The music service, set at $9.99/month, aims to compete with Spotify by leveraging Apple's extensive device user base and incorporating social media elements for artists. Additional updates included enhancements to Apple Pay, which is expanding into the UK, and improvements to iOS 9 featuring more robust search and mapping capabilities.

1. Everything Marketers Need to Know About Apple Music and
New Mobile Software
No windfall of ad data, for now
By Garett Sloane
AdWeek (www.adweek.com)
June 8, 2015
At its Worldwide Developers Conference today, Apple launched
its new Music service and new mobile software that takes on its
top rival Google. But marketers interested in tapping Apple's
potential treasure trove of music-related and mobile data should
hold off on celebrating.
All of Apple's new features are meant to wow users but none
came with easy solutions for brands, according to industry
experts. Part of the reason Apple's latest services are
inhospitable to advertisers is becasue of how heavily it guards
users' private information, the kind of data that Google and
Facebook rely on to serve hyper-targeted ads.
"We honestly just don't want to know [that much about users],"
said Apple's Craig Federighi in one of several thinly veiled
remarks referring to rivals Google and Facebook's practices of
collecting personal information—a key issue for Apple of late.
Still, Apple is coming up with ways for Apple Music to know
what users want to listen to and when, and what news stories
might appeal to them, leaving marketers wondering if that kind
of technology could eventually help advertising on Apple
devices.

2. "Not sharing data is great for a user's experience," said Rye
Clifton, product strategy director at the agency GSD&M. "But
hopefully they figure out a way to anonymize all that data in a
way that is still beneficial from a marketing standpoint."
More generally, Apple showed off Music, new Siri search
capabilities, a digital news platform, and upgrades to Notes and
Maps. The company repeatedly emphasized that all the
personalized features would rely on anonymized data that's not
for sale to benefit marketing.
Apple was light on ad capabilities in other areas, as well. For
instance, the News service, which features digital content from
top publishers, was launched without a clear advertising model.
"Without ads, it's a great experience," said Ryan Mclaughlin,
cheif strategy officer at Tribal Worldwide. "But it's a news-
centric marketer's worst nightmare, at least for the short term."
'One complete thought around music'
Jimmy Iovine, who just joined the company, helped unveil
Apple Music, which is an immediate threat to the likes of
Spotify.
"Guys, can we build a bigger and better ecosystem with the
elegance and simplicity that only Apple can do?" he asked. The
service is "one complete thought around music."
The idea was to incorporate all the album sales, videos and
social networking crucial to today's music industry. Apple
Music lets artists do it all from one hub.
Apple Music launched with a nod to Apple's history of
disrupting the industry when it first created iTunes and the
iPod.

3. Now, artists can share their music on the "biggest platform in
the world that people already have," Iovine said. Indeed, with
the popularity of the iPhone and the iPad, Apple Music debuts
in prime position from the get-go.
The service costs $9.99 a month for individuals, or $14.99 for
families of up to six people, and gives them complete access to
iTunes content on demand.
"Can Apple beat Spotify? Yes, it can, not because its service
will be any better, but because it can build its new music
service into the hundreds of millions of devices that its loyal
Apple users already love," said Forrester researcher James
McQuivey in an email statement coinciding with the
announcement.
More video and social
With artists and studios on board, Apple Music is seen as one of
the best entry points to the iPhone for brands, according to
Dominic Sandifer, president of Greenlight Media and
Marketing.
"Obviously, Apple is a massive player in the content space,"
Sandifer said. "News and music are important elements."
Like so many new digital studios, Greenlight works with brands
to produce content and connect them with the music industry.
Apple Music has a heavy video component with a new social-
media platform called Connect that lets artists share content
with fans. These elements will help Apple differentiate itself
from other subscription services like YouTube and Spotify,
Sandifer said. Iovine said it will "change the way you
experience music forever."
Today's Worldwide Developers Conference also included

4. upgrades to Apple Pay, Apple Watch and the release of iOS 9,
its next generation of mobile software.
Apple Pay
With 1 million retailers in the U.S., Apple Pay is now headed to
the U.K. and has 250,000 retailers on board there at launch.
Apple also changed Passbook's name Wallet, and the payments
platform now takes retailers' loyalty cards.
Consumers can add cards from places like Dunkin' Donuts (a
newcomer) and JCPenney to their accounts and then scan their
phones to pay. Also, Apple Pay now works seamlessly with
Pinterest's new Buyable Pins, so users can click pins and buy
right in the app on iPhones and iPads, something that was first
announced last week.
iOS 9
This upgrade to Apple's mobile software looks an awful lot like
Google Now, the search giant's next-generation software
connecting users to all their daily habits like checking
calendars, directions and apps. Apple now has a similar service
and new software for developers to plug into its search
functions. The voice-activated assistant Siri can search through
everything from apps to reminders to music.
The search can deep-link into apps like OpenTable, so users can
go right to the reservation page of a restaurant without having
to navigate from the app's front page. It also returns video
search results from sites like YouTube, Video, Vevo and
iTunes. Apple says Siri handles 1 billion requests a week.
Maps and Notes
The new Maps finally includes directions for people walking or

5. using public transit. Apple says it gets the most user requests
for map services of any of its rivals—5 billion a week. Notes
are also an important daily activity for iPhone users, and it now
has a Pinterest-like function that lets people save items they
come across online for future reference. The Notes presentation
features Delta faucets as an example of the type of content that
users would put on their to-do lists.
News
Another major announcement from Apple was its latest attempt
at changing the publishing landscape. Apple News, an iteration
of previous services like Newsstand, puts digital articles with
interactive photos and stylish videos into stories from top
publishers like The New York Times, Wired and ESPN. It was
unclear how publishers would monetize the new publishing
platform or whether they would split potential ad revenue with
Apple, but it was clearly designed as an alternative to
Facebook's Instant Articles and apps like Flipboard.