Apple Christens Apple Music With Beats One Global Radio Station

New Look, New Sound

APPLE has unveiled APPLE MUSIC, a new music streaming service at its 2015 WORLD WIDE DEVELOPERS’ CONFERENCE, held at the MOSCONE CENTER in SAN FRANCISCO. An auspicious part of the music service is the BEATS ONE worldwide radio station, which will be run by ZANE LOWE and "broadcast" live 24/7 from NYC, L.A., and LONDON, programmed by a "team of experts."

The global radio station is also Siri-activated, which can do requests such as "Play the top-10 songs in Alternative" to "Play the top-10 songs of 1982."

APPLE MUSIC, which emphasizes human curation of music, essentially features:

* You can stream music anytime and on demand.
* Artist pages, news, and 24-hour worldwide radio station BEATS ONE.
* One app on your iPHONE.
* APPLE Connect, which connects fans with artists, new and unsigned artists as well as superstars.
* My Music, using features from iTUNES including the Up Next queue, and which enables music purchasing.
* Offers playlists based on the music you listen to.

Cost for APPLE MUSIC is free for the first three months, $9.99/month individually or      
$14.99/month for a family of six separate accounts. It will be available starting on JUNE 30th in over 100 countries.

In Other WWDC News...

After starting the conference with a SNL-like video comedy skit, the showcase began with APPLE execs citing improvements in its OS X system, specified as the OS X El Capitan, which is available in beta form to developers now and to the general public in JULY.

Next up was the new iOS 9 system, tweaked to be 40% faster than the iOS 8, and Siri, which is currently answering a billion requests a week. She has been made more proactive in terms of anticipating what music you'd like to hear on your daily jog, calendar notifications and reminders, and finding a heretofore unknown e-mail sender's phone number.

They next cited the growth of APPLE Pay (over one million locations, more client apps, buyable pins within PINTEREST apps), which will debut in the U.K. in JULY. It'll start with 250,000 locations there, launch with eight popular banks and support over 70% of the country's credit/debit cards. Back here, they changed Passbook's name to Wallet, which will provide one place for credit cards, boarding passes and the like. Its Maps app has been updated to provide extensive coverage of urban transit systems.

They also debuted a new News app, which can be personalized to the users' preferences, with graphic that perfectly reproduce the style and look of sources such as the NEW YORK TIMES (the TIMES will deliver 30 free articles daily), WIRED and ESPN.COM, and boasts and integrated video player. It also remembers what you read and will suggest other stories in that field or topic -- including blogs.

Improvements were also cited for the iPAD, including shortcuts to the suggestion bar, an enhanced multitouch keyboard and better multitasking.

The big news on the APPLE Watch is that a new version of WatchOS now has a new Software Development Kit (SDK), which will allow third party developers to run their apps natively on the watch. There's also major improvements in graphics, data and a new Nightstand Mode -- a bedside alarm clock as it recharges. It also supports Facetime Audio for calls.  

Other news of note:

* They added an extra hour of battery life for the iPHONE.
* Improvements to Health Kit, HomeKit, CarPlay and version Swift 2.
* 100 billion app downloads and counting; 850 apps downloaded each second.
* The average person has 119 apps.

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