A new third-party iPhone app is aiming to help Apple Music subscribers “rediscover your own music library”. It’s called Next: Music App, and is the work of a developer called Sorcererhat.
There’s sorcery built in to the app’s branding too: its key feature is a ‘Magic DJ’ which (according to the App Store blurb) “analyses all your music library and creates a mix of all your songs and favourite ones, balancing them in a smart way”. That’s the lead playlist, but the Next app will also create other ‘dynamic’ playlists based on a user’s library and habits – ’25 Most Played’, ‘Forgotten Songs’, ‘Most Played of Pop Genre’ and so on.
It looks suitably Apple Music-like with its visual interface, but the question Music Ally always has about apps built on top of Apple or Spotify’s APIs is how they’ll make money. In Next’s case, the answer is simple: the app costs $4.99 to download from the App Store, as a one-off purchase. As is the way of these things, the big risk in the future is that Apple Music could introduce these kinds of playlists into its own app at any point.
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