The latest entry into the streaming wars is the most intriguing yet.
When the first bits of information about Beats Music trickled out (back when it was code-named Daisy), Beats’ Chief Creative Officer Trent Reznor positioned the streaming service as an improvement on Spotify: “Here’s sixteen million licensed pieces of music,’ they’ve said, but you’re not stumbling into anything. What’s missing is a service that adds a layer of intelligent curation.”
Beats Music launched today, and the industry heavy hitters behind it — a list that includes Reznor, Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre, Topspin co-founder Ian Rogers — have pushed all of their chips behind “intelligent curation.” After just a few hours of tinkering, it’s clear that the service is committed to serving the right song, to the right person, at the right time. But does Beats — which bills itself as “curated by people who believe music is emotion and life” — have what it takes to compete with Spotify, Pandora, and the rest of the crowded streaming marketplace? Here are our first thoughts on its strengths and weaknesses.
Strengths
At the moment, Beats Music’s biggest strength is its list of contributors who have helped curate the library of on-point playlists. This selection of guides and reminders lies at the heart of the Beats experience and feels like it’s been put together carefully and with the kind of expertise that music fans really appreciate. It’s also been done smartly enough so as not to seem alienating – if you don’t want to dig into sublist upon sublist you don’t have to. Beats is just as happy firing forward selections of tunes based on your own specific taste.
The humble playlist feels as if it lies at the heart of the Beats Music experience, and there are a number of ways the app uses its massive archive of lists. The opening screen throws together a series of collections based on the choices you made when signing up (favorite genres, and favorite artists within those genres), but this is merely the tip of the iceberg. A few swipes to the left will reveal the “Find It” tab, where Beats’ vast selection has been herded into three pens: Genres, Activities and Curators. Each of these categories has been surprisingly well pruned, and for those of you used to eye-rolling and track-skipping on Pandora or avoiding Spotify’s lists altogether, browsing should be an unusually positive experience.
A quick look at the Beats Experimental section in Genres reveals an introduction to Swans, a selection of tracks that influenced Oneohtrix Point Never, a collection of early industrial music, the highlights of the Constellation imprint and an hour of Scott Walker solo picks, and the list goes on. Keep swiping down and you’ll start to realize that it isn’t just one or two playlists, it’s loads of them, and for the most part they’re right on the money. There’s a good reason for this – Beats have employed a selection of “curators” who have fed their taste into the machine and let us listen to the spoils.
It’s also quick and feels incredibly solid – while Spotify’s app is equally user friendly, Beats is notably quicker to respond, at least on the iPhone 5S, Apple’s newest handset. It’s also bright and intuitive, and a few minutes of clicking around should teach you most of the functions you need to know to get to grips with the app.
Beats Music’s catalogue is equally worthy of note, harboring the catalogues of some notoriously anti-Spotify names. Radiohead’s catalogue is available to stream, as is at least part of Four Tet’s, suggesting that Beats negotiated a more competitive list of terms. Still, it’s early days yet, and there’s still time for artists to throw a fit and pull their catalogues. It’s happened before and it’ll no doubt happen again.
Weaknesses
Speaking of the catalogue, like the other major players in the streaming game, Beats is more backwards-facing than forward-looking. Understandably, licensing music from major labels and notable indie labels is more practical than, say, uploading the latest material from Young Thug and Galcher Lustwerk. So while Beats is commendable for including the music of Spotify haters, its leading edge is a bit lacking — especially when it comes to hip-hop, which feels particularly backpacker-friendly here.
Because Beats Music is built with mobile in mind, the company has decided to hamstring their web app and forgo a desktop one entirely. This certainly makes sense from a business perspective — mobile is considered the territory most up for grabs — but it will leave some users wanting. The same can be said for their Pandora-style streaming; you can skip songs but you can’t fast-forward them, taking away some control from users.
For now, Beats Music’s ballyhooed secret weapon, “The Sentence,” is more of a weakness than a strength. While filling the blanks in the Madlib-inspired tool can be some harmless fun (“I’m in the club & feel like taking a selfie with your mom to rock”), some of the options are too silly to result in anything meaningful. The Sentence will probably be improved as Beats assembles a Netflix-sized cache of user data, but for now, the dance music for “fingerpainting with robots” and “taking selfies with zombies” is far from useful. And while the curated playlists are the strongest part of Beats, playlists suited to specific activities — BBQing, working or even punching walls — seem more gimmicky than genius at this point.
Our verdict
It’s been available for less than a day, and Beats Music already seems like the best streaming service on the market. The prospect of a 20-million-and-growing catalogue, hundreds of well-curated lists, and ad-free play for under $10 a month sounds like a steal. The braintrust behind Beats Music looked at Spotify’s massive archive and Pandora’s user-driven algorithms, decided to combine the best of both worlds, and pulled it off. Even its initial weaknesses — the gimmicky Sentence and Activities playlist generators — could be useful when Beats Music has the data to turn them into useful features, possibly turning the service into Netflix for music. Beats Music was dreamt up by producers with decades of experience giving people what they want — who says they can’t do the same for streaming?
