Google chairman criticises Apple Music

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has rather amusingly taken a swipe at Apple's music streaming service Apple Music.

The critique centred around the fact that Apple have hired human editors such as DJ Zane Lowe to go about curating music, building playlists etc. Schmidt claims that this practice is now outdated and sneers at Apple for using it.

"A decade ago, to launch a digital music service, you probably would have enlisted a handful of elite taste-makers to pick the hottest new music," he said.

"Today, you're much better off building a smart system that can learn from the real world - what actual listeners are most likely to like next - and help you predict who and where the next Adele might be.

"As a bonus, it's a much less elitist taste-making process - much more democratic - allowing everyone to discover the next big star through our own collective tastes and not through the individual preferences of a select few."

He has a point but then he would champion this method given the fact that it is the way that Google's own streaming service operates.

Apple seem to be using this method to enable them to name drop and add a level of credibility to their streaming service. It's one of the reasons that they possibly aren't doing as well as they could – because they are still trying to hard to look “cool”.

As Schmidt points out, Google's method of creating playlists is a lot fairer and more reliable. At the end of the day, it works best to give consumers what they want.

By Sarah Marie Jones