Apple announced a revolutionary new music service called Apple Music Monday morning at their annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). At a glance, Apple Music provides unlimited access to the entire iTunes music library, 24/7 human-picked radio, and Connect: a way for artists to share content directly with fans. Apple Music will be available for just $9.99 a month, or $14.99 for families of up to 6, starting June 30th in over 100 countries. Here are a few highlights of what makes Apple Music so incredible:

Unlimited Music

Rather than just buying a single song or album, an Apple Music subscription gives you access to Apple’s entire music library - available to stream anytime. You can add your favorite songs and albums to “My Music," which will display on every device. While you can stream any song over the Internet, enabling certain playlists for offline listening (downloading music to the phone) is possible too.

Apple Music subscribers will benefit from the features of iTunes Match. Your existing iTunes collection is combined with the ability to add any song from Apple, as noted in this excerpt from their website:

“With an Apple Music membership, your entire library lives in iCloud. We compare every track in your collection to the Apple Music library to see if we have a copy. If we do, you can automatically listen to it straight from the cloud. If you have music that’s not in our catalog, we upload those songs from iTunes on your Mac or PC. It’s all in iCloud, so it won’t take up any space on your devices.”

24/7 Global Radio

Apple Music includes the all-new Beats 1 Radio station, which is an always-on, ad-free mix of the hottest tracks streaming live from a DJ in either Los Angeles, New York or London. The stations will be hosted by renowned radio hosts and DJs like Ebro Darden, Julie Adenuga and Zane Lowe. Lowe talked about the service via video during the WWDC keynote. Beats 1 Radio also includes revamped Internet radio stations with unlimited track skipping. Those who do not have a subscription have access to both of these radio options, but with unlimited skipping reserved for paid subscribers.

Discover

A huge part of Apple Music will be the ability to discover new music that you’ll enjoy. Apple introduced an easy way to indicate your tastes, by tapping/clicking on “bubbles” which display genres and artists that you like. Apple will give you recommendations on new music constantly in the “For You” section, along with highlighting new music in the “New” section of Apple Music.

Connect

Connect is a revamped version of Apple’s unsuccessful “Ping” service that allows artists to connect directly with fans, right from the Music app. Artists can post videos, audio clips, text, photos, handwritten lyrics and much more. Apple Music subscribers can like, comment and share posts to other social networks. Artists can even respond directly to fans, taking artist-fan interaction to a whole new level.

Each artist has their own profile page where subscribers can view their biography, all the content they’ve posted on Connect, their full discography, which songs of theirs the user has saved in “My Music” and an option to save more of their music.

Other Features of Apple Music

Siri

Apple Music is fully integrated with Siri, which was highlighted during Monday’s keynote. You can search for any song in Apple’s massive library using voice, like, “play songs by Drake” or “play the most popular song from April 1985."

Unsigned Artists

Apple claims unsigned artists will be able to share their music through Apple Music, making it easier for their music to be heard by the masses.

Compatibility

Apple Music will be built in to Mac/iOS in future updates, and an app will be available for PC as well as Android (coming in the Fall).

Membership Features Compared

At www.apple.com/music, Apple highlights what you get with an Apple Music subscription compared to what you get with a free Apple ID:

What do you think of Apple Music? Will you be signing up? Do you think this will effectively shut down other streaming services like Spotify? Let us know in the comments below.