Bloomberg's Webb on Apple Revamping Its Music Service (Audio)

to its product with a Beijing court. So a lot of going on, and then there's more signs at the smartphone market is sputtering. That's certainly not good for Apple. Joining us now from our Bay Area bureau San Francisco is it's also the home of Bloomberg. Point one I might add is Alex Webb, tech reporter for Bloomberg News. So Alex, let's start with the plan to revamp the music service. Boy, oh boy, they certainly took a wrong

turn there. It seems it seems that way a year into the products, you've got to maybe give some Yeah, they've managed to grow it to the thirteen million users that's about a third size of Spotify, but it took Spotify eight years to get to the same level. So it's not an outright failure, but it has potential to be a hell of a lot better. And that's clearly why they are working very hard to try and rejig it and revamp it. And hopefully we'll see that well.

Our sources telling us we'll see that products surface at their Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco next month. Alex is there a tale, maybe a novel in the going the coming and going of all of the executives who've been involved in this music project? I wonder if you could just tell us who the players are and Beat and bring it all together so it is a wide and varied cast of players. And that kind of speaks to the very problem with the product that there isn't

one big figure dictating everything. You have. On the one side, the iTunes veterans, people who built the iTunes store. That's people like Robert Condrick and in the Apple l A office, Jeff Robin, who was an engineer built the original it tune store. And then they buy Beats, which was, you know,

three billion dollar deal. They bring in people like Jimmy Ivying, a huge figure in the music industry, Trent Resina, who we know is a front amount of nine inch Nails, but have been heavily involved with the Beach live streaming service. And then there was a guy called Ian Rodgers who was sort of, I have some sources, really impressive guy in meetings, great ideas, took on other people's ideas. But the Apple iTunes people felt a bit flighted when Apple said,

look at these great people we've hired. They kind of thought, well, we've done a pretty good job ourselves. And so there was a certain amount of tension between these two sides in the development of the product. So Alex quite important is it that Apple lost the fight to keep that iPhone name exclusive to its products in China, especially at a time where suddenly people just don't need to upgrade their iPhones the way they used to, certainly not in

the United States. That's another thing that's hanging over the market, the stock market right now. When it comes to Apple, I think, in and all of itself, it's probably not a huge deal. You know, we're hearing Apple is going to probably appeal this um, but it speaks to a border trend and it was something that Carla can hinted that when he announced that he had divested his Apples stock, namely that things are not all plane sailing in China anymore. Um,

it isn't, you know, untrammeled growth market for them. They are facing increasing problems here. We have the I phone issue, the branding issue. A couple of weeks ago, we heard that that movies and I books have been blocked or they've been told they can no longer sell movies and books through the iTunes store. So there's an element of, you know, I think probably power play on the Chinese side saying just remember whose boss. It's us. It's not you,

the massive mega company. We are the people controlling our own market. Thank you very much for joining us. Alex Aware but Berg technology reporter joining us from San Francisco, talking about Apple shares of Apple down ninety seven cents right now and twenty one cents