Apple Streamlines Music App

Due to popular demand, Apple Inc. is adding a new feature to its Apple Music streaming service: user-friendliness.

After launching a year ago with a cluttered interface and technical glitches that confused and frustrated both users and artists, the company said Monday at its annual developers' conference that it would debut a redesigned Apple Music app this fall.

"The main new feature of the redesign was clarity," said Apple executive Trent Reznor—who co-led the redesign effort—in an interview. Mr. Reznor, the frontman of the band Nine Inch Nails who had also helped design the Beats Music streaming service that Apple acquired in 2014, said the initial problems stemmed from the fact that "we had a big vision…and it became hard to find some things."

Last year a Wall Street Journal review likened the jam-packed app to Russian nesting dolls: "menus within menus within menus!"

The new version will still be packed with listening options but will feature easier-to-read menus, and will make it simpler for users to find songs in their libraries as well as songs to which they recently listened. It will also make even more personalized recommendations on the "For You" feature, taking into account factors such as the time of day and day of the week.

The "Artist Connect" feature will no longer be a separate destination, though artists can still post content for users who opt to "follow" them on the service.

As for user complaints that ranged from lost songs to bugs that prevented syncing playlists on various devices, Apple's vice president of content and media apps, Robert Kondrk, said in the same interview they had addressed all the feedback "in a huge way."

Apple Music now counts 15 million paying subscribers, about half as many as Spotify AB, which launched nearly a decade ago. Apple executive Jimmy Iovine, the co-founder of Beats and the former chairman of Vivendi SA's Interscope Records, said in an interview that 15 million "still isn't a huge number," because subscription streaming "hasn't hit the mainstream yet," despite his marketing efforts that have included TV ads featuring stars such as pop singer Taylor Swift and soul artist Mary J. Blige. He expected a mainstream shift would take more time and education. In the U.S., paid services are struggling especially hard to compete with companies offering free internet radio such as Pandora Media Inc., which counts about 80 million users.

Though Apple has hundreds of millions of customers with iTunes accounts and credit cards on file, it has largely avoided targeting Apple Music at those customers, to preserve its music-download sales, said Apple's senior vice president of internet and software services, Eddy Cue.

"What we've done is attracted a lot of customers that were not buying on iTunes or buying very little," Mr. Cue said the interview. "We're going to continue to invest in iTunes."

Write to Hannah Karp at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 14, 2016 15:55 ET (19:55 GMT)

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