The tech company that changed the music industry is back for an encore. This week, Apple unveiled Apple Music, during its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. 14 years ago, Apple introduced us all to the idea of paying 99 cents for downloadable songs, a concept that made iTunes the world’s top music retailer. But now streaming music subscriptions are all the rage thanks to companies like Spotify and Pandora. Can Apple Music take a bite out of their success? Science and technology correspondent Renay San Miguel talks about the new service with GPB’s Bradley George.

·For $10 a month, Apple Music will give you streaming access to all the tracks in the iTunes library, a live 24-hour global radio station called Beats One and a new social network for musicians called Connect. Is all that going to be enough to lure people away from these streaming music upstarts like Spotify?
Probably not, but I’m willing to wait until I and everybody else can play with Apple Music when it launches June 30. The first three months are free once you sign up, so there’s ample opportunity for sampling, but Apple doesn’t offer a free, ad-supported version of Apple Music, as Spotify and Pandora do. Also I think we’re talking about Apple colliding with generational media consumption habits. I’m old enough to remember 45s and 8-track tapes, but millennials who make up a big part of the online music audience are used to free music and videos, whether legal or illegal. There more than willing to put up with the occasional commercial between songs. That’s a big hill for Apple to climb in all this.

· Are any of these features that Apple introduced really all that new and different?

They’re not, and they’re kind of 2.0 versions of what Apple has already tried with music. Apple Music has a For You section that’s all about human-curated recommendations for songs and playlists, but the other services have been offering that. The Beats One radio station, staffed by three DJs in London, New York and LA is kind of new but two years ago Apple introduce iTunes Radio, it’s first attempt at streaming with channels based on your interest in certain genres and artists. And five years ago Apple tried Ping, a social network within iTunes but it went away very quickly and is seen as one of Apple’s rare misfires. Connect may not be a true social network because while you can like and share all the extra content that musicians put on Connect, like behind the scenes videos and photos, I don’t know that you can really engage your favorite artists in a two-way fashion like Facebook and Twitter. I think Beats One may help with music discovery, introducing new songs from artists around the world, and that’s something that could help it stand out from the crowd.

· Yet Apple wasn’t the first to offer a digital music player, or even downloadable songs – Napster beat them to that. But Apple was able to make the iPod and iTunes big successes. What are the company’s advantages that could make Apple Music work?

Cue up the Pink Floyd classic “Money” here, because Apple has plenty of that. They have very deep pockets, they know how to market and advertise what they do, and they were able to pay for Drake, Trent Reznor and Jimmy Iovine to jump on board the Apple Music express, so maybe more celebrity partnerships are on the horizon. Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify because she wasn’t happy with the royalties from streaming music, but I’ll bet all her albums will be available on Apple Music . Also, the company has an installed user base of 800 million people who have iTunes accounts, which is a very good place to recalibrate from when you’re looking to tweak your music offerings. And let’s say that Apple Music does what Steve Jobs always wanted his software to do, and that’s be easy to use and consumer-friendly. There have been complaints that later versions of iTunes are bloated and confusing; maybe Apple Music will reflect that criticism and be better.

· Apple stock was down slightly Monday following the announcement, and except for Apple Music, there weren’t any other major announcements regarding hardware or software. And the company got raked over the coals on Twitter, didn’t it?

It did, but again I think that was a generational thing. Some of the tech journalists and other Apple watchers I follow on Twitter were making vicious fun of all the “dad dancing” that was on display from the likes of Apple execs Kevin Federichi and Eddy Cue when they were demonstrating the music features. Jimmy Iovine is a famous music producer who’s worked with John Lennon, Springsteen and U2, but that’s the stuff of classic rock now with the younger audiences. Drake seemed nervous when he was on stage. And all these tweets were very quick to point out which existing streaming services have already offered what Apple announced this week.

Renay San Miguel hosts Sci-Tech Now: Georgia on GPB-TV. Follow Renay on Twitter or read his blog for the latest tech news.

Tags: sci-tech now, Apple Music