Life & Technology – 2GB 28th June, 2015

Everybody in the tech world’s been talking about Taylor Swift this week, and for good reason. The 25 year old songstress penned an open letter to Apple, expressing her disappointment with Apple Music. For those who hadn’t heard, Apple was planning to not pay musicians during Apple Music’s three month trial period – a fairly lengthy period of time to go without income.

 

Independent musicians and labels were quite upset by this, but it took Taylor Swift’s open letter for the company to actually do something.  As a result, Apple will also be paying musicians during Apple Music’s trial period.

 

I had a chat with Fabrice Cassou-Dessus, Director of COM1 International, about MSI's range of gaming laptops this week. Check out our podcast if you want to learn about the latest and great! 

 

I also had a talk to Chris Kearney, TomTom Australia's managing director in regards to his new GPSs, the GO 510, GO 5100 and GO 6100. These have two key new features: Lifetime access to global maps, and lifetime access to speed camera maps.

 

New research from Roy Morgan suggests that almost one tenth of Australians are now using streaming services such as Stan, Netflix and Presto. Unsurprisingly, over 1 million of these years are on Netflix, with Presto and Stan boasting just under 100,000 each. Older players Quickflix and Foxtel Play are sitting around 40,000 each.

 

Of course, this comes from a sample of just over 2000 Australians, but it’s impressive nonetheless to see how quickly we’ve adapted new technology. If you haven’t tried a service yet, you should definitely give it a go – everyone offers a free trial, so there’s little reason to not try one out.

 

Dr. Dre is the name that comes to mind when you think about Beats headphones, but he's not the only mind before the popular brand. I had a chat to Kevin Lee, Beats' former marketer and the founder of Sol Republic this week, and he's certainly got an interesting story – click here to read it.