Skip to footer

Beats Music streaming hits a surprise speed bump

Beats Music, the new music streaming service, hit the market on Tuesday with a surprise surge in customers. This led to connectivity issues for Beats Music, but strong momentum into the competitive music-streaming market.

|
ColorWare/PRNewsFoto
Beats by Dre headphones. Beats Electronics has added a new product to its music-enhancing line-up: a streaming music mobile app called Beats Music.

Music fans gained another streaming service Tuesday, when Beats Electronics launched Beats Music, a music-streaming mobile app to accompany its line-up of headphones and speakers.

Though many thought it would be an uphill battle to break into a tough market ruled by music-streaming giants Spotify and Pandora, it appears Beats Music could have some staying power. On Thursday, the company announced it was suspending account sign-ups due to an unexpected surge of customers resulting in a variety of launch issues.

“Due to the extremely high volume of interest in our service some users are experiencing issues,” Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers says in a statement. “Most people are unaffected but our priority is to give everyone a great experience. We prepared for issues like these, have a plan, and are going to hold off on letting more people in while we put this plan in action.”

The app became the most downloaded music app on iTunes after being released, but problems soon followed. Customers took to Twitter to complain of connectivity issues, and the company announced that while people would be able to download the app and sign up for an account, they would not be able to access music until a later date. It also announced that anyone signing up this week would get an extra seven-day free trial of the service.

Beats Music works similarly to Pandora, but takes inspiration from curated, subscription-based services such as Netflix. Customers pay $10 each month for unlimited access to more than 20 million songs and AT&T customers can add the subscription cost onto family mobile plans. Listeners are presented with custom playlists curated by the service’s algorithms and DJs, musicians, and music-industry veterans affiliated with Beats. There is also a mood customization tool called “The Sentence” where customers fill out a mad-lib type sentence about their current state and have a song specifically picked out for that moment. The Verge reviewer Ellis Hamburger gave it a try.

“My first try was ‘I’m in bed, and feel like waking up, with your mom, to musica Mexicana,’ ” he writes. “For this mood, the app offered me 'La Trampa' by Mexican singer-songwriter Ana Barbara. 'The Sentence' is an interesting angle on Songza’s 'pick your moment' radio stations, but is perhaps a bit deceptive since the final fill-in-the-blank is a genre, which seemingly provides most of the impetus for which song starts playing.”

The service is available on iTunes, Google Play, and Windows.

Though Beats is a bit late to entering the increasingly crowded music-streaming arena, it already has a strong fan base stemming from its electronics line-up and experimenting with tools like “The Sentence” could help it stand out.

But first things first: it’s time to get the service up and running.

“Those of you who got on board yesterday, please keep using Beats Music,” adds Mr. Rogers. “New folks, download the app, register, and we’ll drop you a line as soon as possible inviting you back in.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Beats Music streaming hits a surprise speed bump
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2014/0124/Beats-Music-streaming-hits-a-surprise-speed-bump
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe