Offering a new $5 plan for Apple Music is genius. So is limiting it to access via Siri, because your existing customers are not likely to want to downgrade, but Apple is providing a very cheap entry-level deal for anyone who wants access to the world’s music.
Literally: 90 million songs.
From my story at Forbes:
Half the price of the standard plan, the new voice plan won’t let you browse Apple’s music library on your phone or Mac, create your own playlists, or even download the music you love to your devices for offline use. It doesn’t offer spatial music, Apple’s new feature that essentially lets you move around in a sound field, nor does it offer lossless audio as other Apple subscription levels do. In addition, it won’t allow you to play Apple Music on Sonos or other integrated ecosystem speaker systems.
But it will give you 24/7 radio-on-demand without ads for a very low price.
Oh, and it’s only available in 17 countries.