Bought yourself a HomePod yet? Amidst talk that sales aren’t doing too well, we’ve heard rumors about a cheaper version hitting the market, and today there’s some extra information about that cut-price HomePod – it’s going to come with Beats branding.
Remember that Apple acquired the Beats audio company back in 2014, though there’s hardly been a deluge of Apple-and-Beats-branded kit in the meantime. The move could be a handy way of promoting the Beats label while giving HomePod smart speaker sales a much-needed boost at the same time.
The new report comes from Sina in Asia (via 9to5Mac) and should be taken with a pinch of salt for the time being. It’s certainly plausible that Apple would restyle its cheaper HomePod in this way, though it might cause a little confusion for prospective buyers.
The price is right?
As for the cheaper HomePod more generally, the leaked information matches up with what we’ve already heard. The price has apparently been set at $199 (about £150), which is some way south of the $349/$319 you’ll have to pay to get one of the premium HomePods.
Siri could well be cut from the device in an attempt to save some money and differentiate the less expensive speaker from the more expensive one. Presumably the audio quality won’t be quite as mind-blowing either – Apple must be making savings on the hardware components somewhere.
Various tipsters have said the lower-cost HomePod is scheduled to launch before the end of the year, so we shouldn’t have too long to wait. It might show up at WWDC 2018 in June or perhaps at the September event Apple will hold to launch the iPhone XI.
Music on YouTube is big, Really big. More than 1 billion people visit YouTube for music each month. But it’s never been brilliant as a straightforward listening service.
Its latest offering, YouTube Music, is designed to change that. But with Apple and Spotify dominating music streaming, is YouTube Music too little, too late?
What is YouTube Music?
It’s a new music streaming service from Google.
Doesn’t Google already have a music streaming service?
What’s the difference between YouTube Music and Google Play Music?
They have different libraries. With YouTube Music you don’t just get official songs. You get the very many remixes, covers, live versions and parodies YouTube hosts too, as well as music from people who haven’t got record deals. And of course you also get video.
Google Play Music
What unique features does YouTube Music have?
Other than the aforementioned tracks, YouTube Music can search for particular lyrics and even use natural language: Google says you’ll be able to search for “that hipster song with the whistling”.
The app will also offer contextually aware recommendations, so for example if you’re at the airport it’ll create a playlist about fire, crashes and death.
Don’t worry, it won’t really. But it will suggest pumping tracks for the gym or relaxing music before you travel. Discovery is clearly going to be a big part of the YouTube Music experience: it will offer thousands of themed playlists for particular genres of music or moods.
What will YouTube Music cost?
$9.99 per month in the US, with other territory pricings to be confirmed.
Will there be a free version of YouTube Music?
There will. It’ll be ad-supported.
Where does YouTube Red fit with YouTube Music?
That’s a good question. It’s being rebranded as YouTube Premium and will now include YouTube Music as well as Google Play Music. Because it also offers offline video it’ll be more expensive at $11.99 per month. If you’re a YouTube Red subscriber in the US, Australia, South Korea or Mexico your monthly fee won’t go up when Red becomes Premium. But if you’re not already a subscriber and you just want ad-free video, the price just got hiked.
If I pay for YouTube Music, will it get rid of all the ads on everything?
No, just the ones on music. If you want to remove the ads from everything you need YouTube Premium.
Will I get YouTube Originals with YouTube Music?
Nope. That’s a Premium feature.
Can I download YouTube videos with YouTube Music?
Guess what? That’s a Premium feature too. YouTube Music enables you to download music, but not other YouTube content.
When can I get YouTube Music?
If you’re in the US, Australia, New Zealand or Mexico the rollout starts on Tuesday 22 May with an early access programme. A wider rollout will happen “in the coming weeks”. The service will launch in Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom “soon”. You can register your interest on the Coming Soon page.
Will I need an app to access YouTube Music?
Google has redesigned its mobile app and created a new desktop player for YouTube Music, but we’d expect it to work in your web browser too. After all, it’s YouTube.
Is YouTube Music a Google Play Music killer?
It doesn’t make sense to run two similar streaming services under the one roof. Google Play Music’s days are clearly numbered, we think.
Is YouTube Music a Spotify or Apple Music killer?
We doubt it. That’s partly because of sheer numbers – as of January 2018 Spotify had 70 million paying subscribers and Apple Music is expected to overtake it in the US this summer – and partly because everybody knows that YouTube is a free thing that is free. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), 85% of YouTube users go there to listen to music for free.
We think the bulk of YouTube Music users are going to stick to the ad-funded version, and that a fair few will do so while running adblocking tools.
Don’t forget about Amazon, either. Its Alexa push is potentially putting Amazon Music into a lot of homes.
The big problem here is that Google and its video creators don’t make a ton of money from subscriptions – it’s an advertising business, and that’s where the money is. Speaking to Digiday in February, network executives said that YouTube Red was only bringing in around 7% of “YouTube-monetised” revenue. When other sources of income such as sponsorship were taken into account that figure was as low as 1%.
YouTube Red
To be fair, the lack of interest in YouTube Red is partly because YouTube Red was only available in a handful of territories. But one of those territories is the US, which is the largest market for streaming music in the world. There are 30 million people in the US paying to stream music. Very few of them are YouTube Red users.
As industry analyst Mark Mulligan told The Guardian, “YouTube has done this to appease the music labels who like subscription models but it is not going to be a Spotify killer. YouTube is all about generating advertising; it has a strategic disincentive to make its music subscription service work because it is an ad-funded business. I doubt we will see it become a leading music subscription service.”
There’s another issue. In late 2017, Billboard announced that it will devalue YouTube streams in the algorithms it uses to calculate chart placings. In plain English that means for the charts, a Spotify, Tidal or Apple Music stream will be worth more than a YouTube one. If you were a record company, that will affect where you decide not just to run your ads but where you carry out promotions such as the service exclusives that drive so much traffic. Initially at least, that’s going to make YouTube Music less attractive than its streaming rivals.
Tech is no longer just about convenience – it’s about principles. The Cambridge Analytica scandal and the introduction of GDPR are forcing companies to be more transparent about the data they collect from us and how they use it – but is that enough?
Mozilla, creator of Firefox, says that real change has to come from within the industry itself. Tech companies have to want to work differently, and as a users, you have the power to vote with your logins.
Mary Ellen Muckerman, VP of product strategy and services, calls these people ‘conscious choosers’ – the type of people who vote, read labels and are active in their local communities. These people see the companies they use as a badge that represents their values.
Staying in control online
“We did research in the US and Germany and Brazil, and what we found is there is this cohort of people out there who they represent roughly 20 to 25 percent of all internet users,” Muckerman told TechRadar.
“These people understand that they can vote with their wallet in the real world – they are more likely to boycott something, for instance – but they were a bit stymied when it came to exercising that same type of impact and control in the online world.”
The future looks promising for all us us who care about privacy and security
Mary Ellen Muckerman
That’s changing, she believes, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that people are now realizing that the choices they make online can have a tangible impact.
“You see a lot of different polls coming through in terms of how many people actually took an action as it relates to their Facebook behavior,” said Muckerman. “That’s about 20 to 25% of Facebook users, so that’s a nice correlation with the population we found to be conscious choosers.
“That’s a sizeable number of people. This group generally correlates to the millennial population as well. We think that the future looks quite promising for all of us who care about privacy and security, and care really about being able to be in control of the decisions that we make online.”
Farcical consent
The 25% of users pushing for change – the conscious choosers – are fighting against a status quo that distances them from their own data.
“Technology companies haven’t been doing what’s in the best interest of people,” said Mozilla’s chief marketing officer Jascha Kaykas-Wolff. “There’s an expectation that they’re this strange hybrid of a robot and a lawyer. What technology companies do as businesses has so many different applications, the only way that an individual can understand that is to have legal expertise and robotic stamina to be able to read through it. With thousands of words on hundreds of pages to hit the terms of a service agreement, it’s a kind of farcical consent.”
That farcical consent was highlighted neatly at a recent art exhibition – the Glass Room, curated by Tactical Tech and presented by Mozilla. The show offered dozens of striking visualizations of the way companies use and share our personal data, and just how far their reach extends.
Alphabet Empire 3, La Loma & Tactical Tech. Exhibits at the Glass Room highlight how data is used and shared; this map illustrates all the connections between companies owned by Alphabet
One exhibit showed a man reading the full terms and conditions for Amazon’s Kindle service aloud – a process that took over eight hours, and was still going when the exhibition closed for the day. Yes, all the data is there, but it’s totally unrealistic to expect users to read and comprehend it all before agreeing.
“We’ve been investing in things like the Glass Room and making sure that there’s a kind of an easier entry into understanding how companies interact with us,” said Kaykas-Wolff. We think that’s important, and we think more organizations need to be taking a similar stand.”
Leading by example
While legislation like GDPR is forcing companies operating in the EU to take a long, hard look at how they handle their users’ data, Kaykas-Wolff believes the best approach is for tech organizations to take the lead rather than waiting for their hand to be forced.
“Change is gonna come in three different ways,” he said. “It’s gonna come from organizations stepping up and saying ‘I recognize that I’m not contributing to this ecosystem in a way that helps it be healthy over time’; it could potentially come from individuals saying ‘I’m not okay with what’s going on with my information’ and they’re gonna force a change by voting with their wallet; or it can come from Brussels, from the UK, or from DC.
“GDPR is important overall, in that it puts individuals back in control and there are punitive damages if organizations don’t uphold what the law states, but GDPR is only about a specific region. Our opinion is that every company that’s interacting with people’s data needs to treat people the same way, which is putting them in control in any country that they’re in and when we think about the implications for GDPR for Mozilla in particular.”
Kaykas-Wolff says putting users in control has always been one of Mozilla’s key principles – and it’s the same all over the world. He gives the example of sponsored posts in Pocket – a service that lets users bookmark articles to read later, and suggests other posts that they might enjoy. Pocket suggestions appear when you open a new tab in Firefox, and as of Firefox 60, these can include the occasional sponsored post – or ad.
Hey, we’re gonna participate in this business model of the internet. It’s OK, but here’s a better way to approach it if you care about individuals having control of their data
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
“There’s nothing wrong with advertising,” he said, “but the approach for advertising I think has gotten a bit out of control. When any of us choose to go anywhere on the internet, what’s happening right now is that our information is being kind of sucked up – hoovered up for lack of a better term – and advertising companies are trying to figure out how to create that magic growth equation so that they can sell the most expensive ads and get them in front of you. The problem with that is that all of our information is being sucked up into the cloud, and then we don’t have control over any more.
“Our approach is vastly different than that that the data doesn’t get sent to Mozilla. It happens entirely inside of the desktop browser or the mobile browser, and what’s really important is that as an individual who chooses to use Firefox, you can actually turn that on and off. So we’re basically saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna participate in this business model of the internet. It’s OK, but here’s a better way to approach it if you care about individuals having control of their data.’”
Whether you choose to use Firefox and Mozilla’s other tools or not, the choices you make could represent a tipping point for the tech industry. As the number of conscious choosers increases, companies will no longer be able to sacrifice transparency in the name of convenience.
“I’d forecast that a decade from now [transparency] is going to be the requirement for an organization to be successful,” said Kaykas-Wolff. “This is the evolution of the way the businesses need to operate and we’re just now starting to see the front end of it this is the beginning of a trend I think is here to stay.”
