Apple Music VP claims Spotify has ‘stopped innovating,’ touts Beats Pill redesign in new interview

Oliver Schusser might have one of Apple’s most wide-reaching titles, as VP of Apple Music, Apple TV+, Sports, and Beats. In a new interview, Schusser covers a lot of ground, especially focusing on Apple Music, its competitors, and the recent Beats Pill redesign.

Schusser sat down with Craig McLean at Wallpaper and touted Apple Music’s constant pace of innovation, and its competitors being distracted from music.

We are focused on music while other people are running away from music into podcasts and audiobooks…And while most others in the marketplace have sort of stopped innovating, we’ve been really pushing hard

Schusser highlights recent features like Apple Music Sing, Classical, lyrics, and spatial audio as evidence of Apple Music’s premium, innovative record.

With spatial audio, we’ve completely revolutionised the listening experience. [Historically] we went from mono to stereo and then, for decades, there was nothing else. Then we completely invented a new standard [where] now 90 per cent of our subscribers are listening to music in spatial audio.

On the new Beats Pill, Schusser explains the years-long gap between revisions of the product by emphasizing the need to focus on headphones first:

We needed to do a lot of work. We look at Beats as a premium product company. We’re in the headphone space. Our aspirations are to make the best headphones with the best technology. We needed to completely redesign and reimagine our entire headphone portfolio. We decided to focus on that first before we were going to get to the Pill.

Finally, he gets into the technical nitty gritty of physical design changes that enable the new Beats Pill to provide better sound quality in a lighter package overall.

With [preceding model] Pill+ we had dual woofers and dual tweeters, both circular shaped,’ continues Bruksch, here to talk spec and tech while the boss gives more of a C-suite overview. ‘We completely redesigned and reimagined that, with a single racetrack woofer [and] single tweeter that are much more competent and capable of louder sound, bigger sound, lower distortion. The single woofer itself displaces 1.9 times more air than the two woofers combined in the Pill+. They have stronger neodymium magnets. They give 20 per cent stronger motor force. Together that just gives us a lot more potential on the low end for better bass reproduction, cleaner bass reproduction.

Schusser is uniquely positioned to comment on Apple’s ambitions across a variety of departments, so the full interview is well worth a read.

One word that comes up over and over is ‘premium,’ both as a north star for Apple Music and for Beats—it’s pretty clear Apple feels content letting competitors like Spotify and YouTube own the free music market, while it focuses on competing for paid subscribers.