Apple has become the most valuable company in the world by making products. Now it's testing ways to draw more of you to those products with shows you can only watch on them. To do that, Apple has teamed up with the ragtag, provocative, millennial-attracting media powerhouse known as Vice.
Apple Music, the company's music streaming service, will now feature a new six-episode docu-series called The Score, produced in partnership with Vice Media. The weekly show will focus on musicians and local music scenes in Brazil, Iceland, and elsewhere. Each episode will first debut exclusively on Apple Music.
This is, well, kind of weird. If you subscribe to Apple Music, you probably use it to, you know, listen to music. If you don't, you probably won't start just because of this show. But for Apple, the best way to bring in new subscribers (and, hopefully, iPhone buyers) is by offering something you can't get elsewhere, a concept exemplified by its Beats 1 radio station. The Score is another way of testing that strategy.
A radio station is great, but original TV shows, films, and docu-series can draw truly sizeable audiences, as Netflix and Amazon have shown. Apple seems keen on getting in on that video action, and it's using its music service, rather than, say, the Apple TV, as the way in. This isn't the first sign from Apple that original video is the next frontier for the company. According to The Hollywood Reporter, it's developing a pretty racy original scripted series with Beats' Dr. Dre.
And yet, you might think, a Dr. Dre series? A Vice show about music? In a world where Netflix is making Daredevil, they're, uh, interesting choices to say the least. But the company has to start somewhere. And, as history dating back to the dawn of iTunes and the iPod has shown, Apple tends to start in on something new with music. Alongside The Score, Apple Music will include playlists featuring artists from the show. So the app sort of makes sense for viewers. But if it works, music will only be where it starts.
