via QZ.com:
Beats 1 has something that is rare in the world of digital music: scarcity. Listeners can’t choose a song and play it over and over. (They can do that elsewhere on Apple Music.) But curation doesn’t mean songs aren’t repeated. We counted 12,445 tracks but only 3,371 unique songs, meaning each track was played an average of 3.7 times. Eighteen of the 20 songs in the table above were played over 50 times.
From that list, these are the artists I’ve heard of – Beck, Calvin Harris, Skrillex, Taylor Swift.
The rest of them could be indie but I’m going to go with no. All this tells me is that the promise that Beats1 would help me discover new music without having to go out and discover it for myself has failed. Not only does iTunes not let me click and buy the song I’m currently hearing, but they’re basically just playing a Kiss-FM style station with a few unknowns thrown in (maybe one song per hour from someone that isn’t “Popular”.
That’s a failure in my eyes and really disappointing.