Apple Music’s Ebro Darden Talks About Apple Music and More in New Interview

Ebro Darden has been a Beats 1 host for several years, but, recently, he was promoted to the Global Head of Hip-Hop and R&B at Apple Music.

Now, Darden has sat down with Complex to talk about the new role, and how it will not only change his own life, but how he plans on changing Apple Music for the better moving forward. First and foremost, Darden understands that Apple Music’s primary use case for most subscribers is the streaming service, playlists, and other features in this area. It might not be Beats 1. But Darden wants to change how easy it is to find content on the radio platform.

He wants to make Beats 1 easier to use, and the content therein, especially the hosted shows, easier to find. That may mean some tweaks to the UI are incoming, but, of course, there isn’t any firm date or even any details on what that might look like in the future. And Darden wants to make sure that Apple Music isn’t putting all of its eggs in the U.S. basket, either, as he aims to cast a wider net to find artist within the Hip-Hop and R&B genres all over the globe (which certainly fits under the umbrella of the job title!) and surface them within Apple Music.

“It all depends on where our audience is consuming the music. I’m just going to be looking at the heat map and to see where people are engaging with the platform, where we see potential for growth opportunities, and digging in. Hip-hop and R&B is a global phenomenon unlike any music we’ve ever seen before. It’s going to be really about looking at where the music’s being made and finding great music.”

Darden wants to help find artists and promote them within Apple Music, but there wasn’t any specific talk about exclusives, which is probably a good thing. Apple Music had a huge focus on landing major exclusive launches for albums and artists, but that didn’t go over very well for everyone in the music industry. As a result, Apple has toned down that initiative in a big way. Still, Darden says he wants to be “on the ground in the communities where the music’s being made”, which will hopefully simply mean we get more artist profiles and new content, without necessarily tying it to major exclusive deals that limit availability across other streaming platforms.

The full interview is certainly worth a read. Darden’s promotion within Apple Music is a big one, and hopefully he can have a lasting impact on the platform as a whole that generates positive output through the whole app and service, and not strictly in the genres he’s overseeing.

[via Complex]

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