Apple today announced it’s adding two new offerings to its global radio portfolio: a hits station and one for country music. Somewhat confusing for fans of its existing and immensely popular Beats 1, Apple also announced the station will be renamed Apple Music 1. As with its infuriatingly frustrating Apple TV and TV+ branding, the devil’s in the details in terms of knowing what the hell Apple is referring to going forward.
Let me try to sum this up as clearly as possible: You can listen to Apple Music 1 on Apple Music the app, which is where you can sign up for Apple Music the subscription—which is basically Apple’s premium Siri-compatible version of Spotify. Apple didn’t provide a lot of clarity on why this renaming is happening now and why it’s doing the bad HBO branding thing by giving multiple products and services only slightly different iterations of the same name. If I had to guess, though, it may have something to do with uniformity across its offerings and seizing on every opportunity to go full Apple at every turn.
If there was any question that Apple wants you to know exactly who makes all its services—which grow in number seemingly by the day—there certainly isn’t with today’s rollout. Its popular music station, which will feature chart-toppers from the eighties through the early aughts, will be called Apple Music Hits. The new country music station, I’m fairly confident you’ve guessed by now, will be Apple Music Country.
Basically, Apple is intentionally forcing us to utter its name every single time we refer to any service. No one is going to say they recently subscribed to “music” or they just bought a “TV” because these terms are so nondescript they could refer to virtually anything. We wear Apple Watches and subscribe to Apple Music and listen to Apple Music 1 and pay for Apple TV+ that we watch with Apple TV the app on our physical Apple TV set-top boxes, all while we read Apple News (or Apple News+) and play Apple Arcade and pay for all of it with Apple Pay.
Apple, Apple, Apple. Apple? Apple! 🍎 🍏
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Source: gizmodo.com
