Apple spent much of the 2000s riding high on a wave of cool. Whether it was MP3 players, smartphones, tablets or laptops, Apple was the brand that everyone wanted, and anything else seemed like the “sensible” (read: uncool) pair of sneakers your parents forced you wear in sixth grade. (Growing up in New York in the '70s, we used to call them “skips.”)
This wasn’t entirely random. Apple’s strategy was fairly straightforward: find a nascent industry where the existing products were functional but unsexy, designed by engineers for people with a high degree of tech savvy. Then Apple would come in with a product with fresh design and an elegant, intuitive interface and sell it for a premium price, thus creating the “it” product of the moment. It was a logical enough plan, and it worked brilliantly for many years.
But recently, Apple’s strategy has been coming up short. That’s because the companies they are seeking to displace aren’t the pushovers their previous competitors have been.
Apple’s first “failure to dominate” came with Apple Music, their streaming music service. After years of users downloading (and thus owning) music via iTunes, Apple attempted to introduce their own streaming service. Only this time, they likely got in too late. Services like Pandora and (especially) Spotify had already grabbed the popular imagination, and their products were well designed and well liked. Apple Music was neither of those things and it did not provide users with anything that looked like an improvement or reason to switch from the platforms they were already using. One of its key selling points—the ability to import your iTunes library—was lost on millennials and Gen Zs, most of whom didn’t own any music to begin with.
That gap is reflected in current adoption numbers, with millennials preferring Spotify to Apple Music 47% to 14%. And though Spotify may still be struggling to turn a profit while Apple sits on a quarter-trillion dollar war chest, they have something far more valuable—that cool factor. Apple is your parents' music service, clunky and more than a bit dorky. Spotify and Pandora are the hip services that younger listeners want.
By :No weapon Gh
Source: Forbes
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