Apple Wants to Kill Free Music Streaming

Apple Wants to Kill Free Music Streaming
Earlier this week, The Verge reports that the Department of Justice (DoJ) is looking into Apple\'s business practices ahead of the rumored Beats Music revamp and integration into iOS. The DoJ has already taken interviews of highly-ranked music industry executives about the matter. Apple\'s "aggressive tactics" has gotten the attention of the DoJ, which contradicts with Apple\'s push to kill free music streaming services such as Spotify, cites multiple sources. If the company does take on this move, they have a potential of killing services such as YouTube, Rdio and Pandora. The report goes onto say that Apple is “using its considerable power in the music industry” to stop labels from renewing its deal with Spotify to stream music free. “Sources also indicated that Apple offered to pay YouTube’s music licensing fee to Universal Music Group if the label stopped allowing its songs on YouTube." Alongside its music streaming service, which, presumably is going to be running under the iTunes brand, Apple tried to reduce the price on its upcoming streaming service. Typically, services like Spotify or Rdio offer its premium unlimited ad-free service at $9.99, though Apple is trying to push a reported failed pricing of $7.99.

‘Transynd’ Your Music Experience on Your iPhone

‘Transynd’ Your Music Experience on Your iPhone

Everyone has differing preferences for their music needs on their iDevices; some people are heavy audiophiles and have nothing but FLACs in their iTunes, others do nothing but stream with Pandora or Spotify, and then there are people who are about in the middle like me. If you don\'t need all of the functionality of the Music app then Transcynd is for you! It\'s currently $0.99 on the App Store but the developer, Darran Hall told me that he plans on making it free for the next update after he polishes a few features and squashes a bug or two. He\'s a great guy and deserves the money so I suggest you go buy it! Having a beautiful no nonsense card style interface it allows you to easily select a song and start playing it quickly. The control card colorizes itself with the colors of the currently playing song\'s album artwork, which makes it visually pleasing to play your music. It reminds me of the Control Center but with a more minimalist interface, when you swipe it up the album art slides down from the top as well as sliding back up out of the way when you slide it back down, the animations are quite nice.