Apple Music to introduce City Charts daily playlists

Apple Music is introducing new City Charts playlists as a way to “explore what’s popular” in over 100 cities from all over the world with the new music charts to be updated daily.

It will be available in the next iOS 14.5 release, according to a report in 9 To 5 Mac.

Apple has not issued a release date, but the hints are it could be towards the end of March.

At this stage, it is also not known which cities are included in the initiative, but it can be expected that Sydney, and perhaps Melbourne, will be among them.

Apple Music, after all, needs to ramp up its presence in Australia. According to a June 2020 report from Roy Morgan Research, it only ranks #3 in the Australian market.

Spotify is the clear leader with eight million users, and YouTube Music with 5.5 million.

The iOS 14.5 update also brings some enhancements to Apple Music subscribers.

There are new ways to share selected real-time lyrics through iMessage and Instagram.

When viewing the lyrics, a long-press will pull up a share card. Several lines, with a maximum of 150 characters, can then be shared to Instagram Stories for example.

When shared to iMessage, the highlighted text comes with attached audio.

Users will also find it easier to play music with third-party apps using Siri. iOS 14.5 will use Siri intelligence to select music services based on listening behaviour.

Apple is emphasising that the feature is not a part of Siri’s intelligence.

Listeners will have to specify default music service support when they tell Siri to play a song, album or artist. It won’t automatically go to the service of choice.