Big news today emerging out of Cupertino.
Apple is reportedly getting ready to launch subscription bundles – pulling its Music, TV, News, Gaming and cloud storage services together under one monthly price – as early as October.
Inside Apple, the bundles are being dubbed as ‘Apple One’, and the project is being led by Apple’s services chief, Peter Stern.
That’s all according to a report published by Bloomberg today (August 13). Citing “people with knowledge of the effort”, the report suggests that consumers will be able to choose differently priced tiers of the ‘Apple One’ bundle, which offer the benefit of a cheaper monthly price than subscribing to each service separately.
The basic ‘Apple One’ package, says Bloomberg, will pull together Apple Music and Apple TV+.
The next tier, for a higher price, will also add the Apple Arcade gaming service, and an additionally expensive tier will throw in Apple News+.
The most expensive tier of all will offer users subscriptions to each of Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and Apple News+, as well as extra iCloud storage for files and photos.
The move, adds Bloomberg‘s article, is intended “to encourage customers to subscribe to more Apple services, which will generate more recurring revenue”.
Last month, as part of its fiscal Q3 results, Apple announced that its Services division generated $13.16bn in the three months to end of June 2020, up 14.8% year-on-year.
It’s worth noting that Apple still reportedly has a few obstacles to overcome before a Music-plus-TV-plus-News etc. bundle could be rolled out.
The company recently signed multi-year licensing deals with Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music for its music streaming service Apple Music – but the Financial Times reported that these deals do not permit Apple to bundle Apple Music with other services.
It therefore looks like Apple still has some negotiating to do with music’s biggest rightsholders.
In June, 9to5Mac reported to have found evidence that Apple was developing a multi-media subscription bundle, citing iOS 13.5.5 beta code.
9to5Mac claimed to have found references to phrases such as “bundle offer” and “bundle subscription” in iOS 13.5.5 internal files that weren’t present in previous versions of iOS.Music Business Worldwide
