Apple Music has 6.5 million paying subscribers and Beats 1 has become a media darling. But Connect, the other new Apple music service released at the same time, appears to be getting only moderate traction with both fans and artists. There are signs, however, that Apple may be about to up its game.
Apple Music has quietly added the option to embed a video hosted on the site elsewhere on the web. The embed button first showed up on the new Drake video and only appears in some locations. More examples have been cropping up, but the feature is not yet available to all artists.
Here the Kenny Chesney Apple Music ad includes the embed feature:
Currently most videos within Apple Music’s ‘music social network’ Connect are delivered via a link to YouTube. Outside embeds represent a rare move for Apple who has almost always favored its own very closed ecosystem.
If Apple’s next – and I think likely- move is to open video embeds to all artists, it would put Apple Connect in more direct competition with YouTube, just as the online video giant is launching its own music service and with Facebook, where video use is exploding and new music initiatives are taking shape.
