Apple Beats On Streaming Music Service Competition With Free Trial Period, Sample Songs, New iTunes Radio Stations

No one except Apple itself knows when it's going to be relaunching its Beats Music service, but one thing we can feel pretty confident about is that when it launches, it's going to make a big impact. Apple doesn't do things small, and given its expertise in the digital music market, Beats Music could become a huge deal, and hit competitors right where it hurts.

According to Re/code, Apple has a couple of ideas in mind that could help it stand out of the crowd. If we're talking about features that already exist, Apple simply wants to do them better better.

For starters, depending on the negotiations it's able to make with music labels, Apple would like to offer a 1~3 month free trial period, which we'd presume wouldn't feature advertising of any kind. Further, a feature will be present that will allow music owners to pick and choose a sampling of songs that will remain free on the service, as a way to entice people to want to hear more when their trial period is over.

Perhaps one of the best features is a revamping of iTunes Radio, featuring human-curated stations. And we're talking humans that know what they're doing, such as BBC 1's DJ Zane Lowe.

On paper, this all looks good, but it's really hard to say whether or not this will be enough to get people to move over from competing services - especially those that allow 100% free ad-supported subscriptions. On that topic, it's interesting to note that Apple's looking to give a free option at all (even as a trial), as we reported earlier this week that the company may have been trying to get services like Spotify to go pay-only.

Even if you have no interest in Beats Music, it's hard to not be a little bit curious about what Apple could manage to pull off. All we can do for now is wait, and hope that we learn a lot more at next month's WWDC.