Apple has confirmed that its next press launch will be on 12 September, which is when we can expect the iPhone 8 to be unveiled. Could there be some Apple Music news then too?
It will be surprising if Apple doesn’t offer an updated figure for the service’s paying subscribers: based on its growth from 20 million in December 2016 to 27 million by early June 2017, Apple Music should be past the 30 million mark by the September event.
What else? Analysts at Barclays have an idea: in a note for investors, they have suggested that Apple could bundle a year’s worth of Apple Music, as well as 200GB of iCloud storage, into the iPhone 8.
“We estimate incremental profits generated from higher iPhone 8 sales could outweigh additional costs, achieving gross profit accretion of $1.3bn,” claimed the research note, which sets out Barclays’ view that bundled music and cloud storage could offset the fact that the iPhone 8 is expected to be more expensive than its predecessors.
This wouldn’t be a year’s ‘free trial’ of Apple Music – at least not in the way the existing three-month trial works when people sign up to the service – but it would be an aggressive and hard-to-counter (unless you’re Google) marketing strategy in the music-streaming space.
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