very different, somewhere in the middle of YouTube, Facebook and SoundCloud, letting artists post music, videos, photos and more to their profile pages. It couldn’t be any more 2015 if it tried. Apple, partly because of its scale and also partly because it treats music as “art” rather than “content”, has generally had strong relations with not just the music industry but artists themselves and, generally, it has a good reputation among artists. Compare that to Spotify, which has been criticized by artists from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke to Taylor Swift. In contrast, Apple comes across as a benevolent uncle. There is the smell of revolution in the air and Apple is making sure it’s on the right side of the battle lines when they are drawn up. Where are the artist exclusives? This is going to be the interesting bit when the service actually goes live. Getting exclusives for big albums is going to become crucial to streaming. Spotify paid a lot of money to get Led Zeppelin and Metallica exclusively. Apple will have been watching this carefully and making its own notes. It already has AC/DC and the Beatles’ catalogues exclusively for download on iTunes but it remains to be seen if it can persuade these two to make the jump into streaming. It also managed to get the surprise Beyoncé album in 2013 before anyone else so it is inevitable that it will want more like that.