Tech

Apple Music will now show you which songs are most popular in your city

The charts are, unsurprisingly, dominated by major artists.

These December headphones sales will hold you over as you wait for AirPods Max.
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Apple Music now features playlists that list the top 25 songs in more than 100 cities around the world, from Los Angeles to Auckland and Beijing. According to Billboard, the songs are updated daily.

The addition was included in iOS 14.5, which was released yesterday for iPad and iPhone. The software update brought some major changes to iOS, including new privacy settings and the ability to unlock your iPhone even while wearing a mask. And of course, there are new emojis.

Shocker, people around the world listen to a lot of the same stuff. Input

Boring — The top 25 playlists can be found in the Browse section of the app, but even if you don’t subscribe to Apple Music, you can view the lists on the web. You’ll be shocked to learn they aren’t very interesting. Save for a few exceptions, the charts across the world are dominated by names like Justin Bieber. They aren’t even skewed much in heavily censored China, where Bieber is number one today followed by the likes of The Weeknd and Taylor Swift. It turns out people around the world listen to a lot of the same stuff.

New battleground — Apple stopped reporting subscriber numbers back in 2019, when it said that Apple Music had reached 60 million customers worldwide. Estimates today suggest it has at least 72 million subscribers.

That’s still a lot less than rival Spotify, which reported 155 million subscribers at the end of last year. It’s hard to stand out when every music app has basically the same catalog, so the rivals are now gunning to dominate the fast-growing market for another form of audio: podcasts. Spotify has spent hundreds of millions on exclusive shows, and both companies announced recently that they will allow podcasters to offer premium subscriptions to their shows. Maybe Apple, which invented the term ‘podcast’, will be able to make up ground there.