Apple wanted to launch its own video service last year, but couldn’t get the deals it wanted from the TV guys. Expect it to keep trying.
Apple Music Partners With Vice to Feed Its Increasing Appetite for Exclusive Video
Today, a new series of music documentaries. Down the road: A Dr. Dre miniseries.
Vice
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
And in the meantime, it continues to add to its own collection of videos via Apple Music, its music subscription service. Last month we learned that Apple Music was financing a miniseries about the life of Dr. Dre. Today, it’s debuting “The Score,” a new documentary series from Vice Media.
Like everything else Apple Music is funding, you can only see “The Score” on Apple Music, at least for now*. Today’s debut is a two-part, 20-minute series about the hip-hop scene Native Americans have created at the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota.
If you’re counting, this is the third video exclusive Apple Music has unveiled since launching: It financed Drake’s “Hotline Bling” clip, as well as Taylor Swift’s concert movie. The Dre show should run sometime later this year, and in the meantime we’ll certainly hear and see more stuff from Apple.
What Apple hasn’t done, at least yet, is make a big deal about the fact that they’ve got these exclusives. If you call them up and ask them about it, the company won’t deny that they exist. But they’re not tooting their horn about it, which seems a little odd, since the whole point of these things is to market Apple Music.
Maybe that comes later.
* It will eventually end up other places, because Vice Media’s Shane Smith likes to sell his stuff to as many buyers as possible. So would you, if you could.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
