MANILA, Philippines – Music fans everywhere will likely be flocking to Apple Music for the launch of its 3-month free trial later this Tuesday, June 30 (July 1 in the Philippines). 

For those who are intrigued by this Spotify contender but are still on the fence, however, here’s a quick and dirty guide to what you can expect during your trial period, should you decide to sign up with your Apple ID.

What do I get from Apple Music?

Apple Music provides users with on-demand music, connecting your purchased songs on iTunes with an even larger group of around 30 million songs.

Apple Music users can listen to specific artists, search for particular songs they want to hear, and even listen along to curated music made by human music curators, as opposed to machine-curated or algorithm-powered playlists. This curation feature comes from its acquisition of the Beats Music service in 2014. 

Apple Music also comes with its own radio service. The radio station, called Beats 1, will broadcast live, featuring DJ personalities from around the world, serving what you’d expect from a radio station, including music, popular news, interviews, and the like. This service, at least for now, will be commercial free.

Lastly, Connect is a feature that will allow users and artists to interact with one another. Artists can use Apple Music connect to share lyrics, pictures, videos, and songs with fans. Fans can then choose to like, comment, or share the content of the artist through Facebook, Twitter, email, or Apple’s messaging services.

Aside from these 3 main features, Apple Music will also allow users to create their own playlists, then save and share them via social media.

What happens to iTunes and purchasing music?

There won’t be any significant changes to iTunes itself, but it will connect itself to Apple Music so you can listen to your personal music via streaming.

You can still purchase music on iTunes, but Apple Music will pull your iTunes playlists and music library into Apple Music when it launches.

What is specific to subscriptions and the free trial?

You can do quite a bit with Apple Music freely, but, according to the matrix available on Apple Music’s Membership page, you can potentially get a lot more out of the experience if you enjoy listening to things on Apple Music.

With just an Apple ID connection, you can view and follow artists on the Connect portion of the service, as well as listen to Beats 1 and Apple Music Radio stations, with limited skipping of songs available.

Apple Music’s free trial, along with subscriptions, will provide unlimited skips for Apple Music Radio stations. You can also play and save content from Connect and like Connect content or songs on the radio feature as you see fit.

It will also allow the what may be the biggest draw of Apple Music – the ability to listen to the Apple Music library – to add that content to your personal library, and to save it for offline listening.

What does the free trial mean?

Simply put, the free trial will let users expand their personal music library to Apple’s roster of 30 million songs for 3 months, with users able to experience the music in a variety of formats.

If you like the service, you can continue the same capabilities with a future monthly subscription of $9.99 for a single user or $14.99 for up to 6 people in your family, provided that Family Sharing is enabled on your home systems.

How do I join Apple Music?

If you own an iOS device, you just need to update it to iOS 8.4, then update iTunes on your PC or Mac. After that, you should be able to get on the Apple Music bandwagon as soon as it hits. Android and Apple TV will get support later in the fall.  – Rappler.com

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