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Apple has announced the launch of Apple Music, an app that adds a subscription streaming service to iTunes, the largest music retailer in the world.

The announcement, made at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, comes more than a year after Apple acquired Beats Music, the streaming service founded by Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre and Trent Reznor. Iovine and Reznor both appeared in the presentation to explain and introduce elements of the service, which will include a live, "24/7 global radio" station and a social media-like feature called "Connect" where musicians can directly upload content like lyrics, videos and photos.

The Record

How Streaming Is Changing Music

Apple Music will be available on June 30. The service, which will have no free option, will cost $9.99 a month for a single subscription or $14.99 a month for a "family" subscription that allows up to six people to share an account. In an indication of the company's hopes for its reach, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the service would be available on Android phones in the fall. Until now, iTunes has only been available on Apple devices.

Streaming At The Tipping Point

From the stage, Iovine, a longtime music executive employed by Apple since the acquisition of Beats, recalled the moment he first saw the iTunes store. It was a "simple, elegant way to buy music online" in an era when the recording industry had been decimated by file sharing, he said. But Apple Music is entering a playing field already crowded by other streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio, Pandora and Tidal.

As NPR's Laura Sydell, who was in the audience at the event, tweeted, Iovine characterized the current streaming ecosystem as confusing and overwhelming, and he positioned Apple Music as "a complete thought around music," a slightly awkward catchphrase later echoed in a video presentation by musician Trent Reznor. (That phrase might have been an oblique reference to the Beats Music feature The Sentence, in which users could create a playlist by describing their listening scenario. Get it? The Sentence ... a "complete thought." Oh well.)

#WWDC15 Jimmy Iovine says this is a way to organize the mess of music.

— Laura Sydell (@Sydell) June 8, 2015

Announced after nearly two hours of presentations on how Apple's various operating systems will be updated in the coming year (promised developments: a new news app, open source programming language, Siri will be better, Maps will be better, Apple Pay continues to expand to more retailers), the introduction of the music service featured the participation of many well-known musicians including The Alabama Shakes, Pharrell Williams and The Weeknd, who performed a radio-ready new song.

Apple Music's global 24/7 radio station will be staffed by notable DJs hired from terrestrial and Web radio stations: former BBC host Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden of New York's Hot 97 and Julie Adenuga of Rinse FM.

Also part of the service, but relegated to a single mention at the end of the presentation, was the iTunes store itself, which Cook called "the best place to buy music." If you're still into that kind of thing.

Apple

streaming

Every four years, politicians and the reporters who cover them spend months in Iowa wooing voters ahead of the February caucuses. There's inevitably lots of photo ops with grain silos and corn fields in the background, not to mention interviews with weathered farmers who are supposed to stand in for the state's two million registered voters.

Iowans will do plenty of eye-rolling this campaign, but many have developed a sense of humor about those stereotypes. Mike Draper, owner of RAYGUN in Des Moines, has turned cliches about his home state into a booming business, poking fun at the people who make them. At his store, there's a whole section for national media, filled with T-shirts that say things like, "Is there a bale of hay I can interview you next to?"

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Mike Draper, owner of RAYGUN, shows off his latest line of T-shirts for out-of-state media in downtown Des Moines's East Village district. Clay Masters/IPR hide caption

itoggle caption Clay Masters/IPR

Mike Draper, owner of RAYGUN, shows off his latest line of T-shirts for out-of-state media in downtown Des Moines's East Village district.

Clay Masters/IPR

How campaigns act about — and in — Iowa could matter, according to pollster J. Ann Selzer. If they buy into the stereotypes about Iowa and agriculture, she says, they'll attract a totally different set of voters on caucus night. But if they broaden their scope "and understand that Des Moines is the third-largest insurance capital on the planet, very white collar, lots of people doing lots of different things, there's a whole other world besides ag in Iowa."

Here's what Iowans want you to know about the state:

1. It's not all corn fields

The Iowa of many people's mind may be the dour farmers in the iconic painting, American Gothic, or the corn fields of Field of Dreams. But most Iowans don't live off the land. Just 7 percent of the state's population works in agriculture, said David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University. Two-thirds of Iowans live in cities and suburbs, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

2. It's having a diversity boom

Half of the state's population growth over the past 25 years has come from Latinos and immigrants. Iowa's Latino population increased five-fold between 1990 and 2010 to 150,000. The state's African-American and Asian populations have also exploded, according to Census data analyzed by Mark Grey, the Director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration at the University of Northern Iowa.

3. One of Iowa's fastest-growing cash crops these days is wind

The state's prairies aren't just ideal for growing corn and soybeans. They're also perfect for harvesting wind power. Iowa is covered with more than 3,000 giant wind turbines and has the third largest installed-wind-energy capacity of all states, behind Texas and California, according to the American Wind Energy Association. The turbines generate a third of the state's energy — a number which is set to rise as a more major wind projects go online in the coming years.

4. It's a hub for the insurance industry

Visitors to Des Moines sometimes tell Mike Draper, "It's bigger than I thought. You got buildings here?" Draper chuckles, "Yeah, we've got buildings here," including skyscrapers. Thank the insurance industry for some of that glossy sheen. The city is a major hub for the industry and home to 29 life insurers, thanks to a friendly regulatory climate, as reported by Bloomberg News.

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Blake Rupe, owner and founder of Re-APP, Inc. at work at Vault Coworking & Collaboration Space in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Clay Masters/IPR hide caption

itoggle caption Clay Masters/IPR

Blake Rupe, owner and founder of Re-APP, Inc. at work at Vault Coworking & Collaboration Space in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Clay Masters/IPR

5. There's a thriving tech scene

Both Google and Facebook have large data centers in Iowa, and the state is home to a growing start-up scene. Blake Rupe, a 27-year-old who founded a smartphone app that tracks recycling habits, says she chose to stay in Iowa because of the community, and "the cost of living here makes it so much easier to own a business."

Still reeling from a corruption scandal that has ensnared some of its top officials and led to the resignation of its president, FIFA said it was delaying the bidding process on the 2026 World Cup.

"Due to the situation, I think it's nonsense to start any bidding process for the time being," Jrme Valcke, FIFA's secretary general, said during a press conference on Wednesday.

In a separate statement, FIFA said the organization's executive committee will discuss the process at a later date.

The BBC reports:

"The vote to decide who will host the 2026 World Cup is due to take place in Kuala Lumpur in May 2017.

"The United States are front-runners to stage the tournament, but Canada, Mexico and Colombia are also thought to be interested. Russia and Qatar were selected to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups by a secret ballot of Fifa's 22 executive members in December 2010.

"But Swiss prosecutors are now investigating alleged financial irregularities surrounding the bidding process. Both Russia and Qatar have denied any wrongdoing."

Bloomberg reports that during the press conference, Valcke was defensive. If you remember, Valcke was not named in the U.S. bribery investigation, but subsequent reporting linked him to a $10 million payment that was allegedly part of a bribe to help South Africa secure the right to host the 2010 World Cup.

In his first press conference since those reports surfaced, Valcke said he had done no wrong. Bloomberg adds:

"The money involved came from South African authorities and not FIFA, and the transfer was in line with FIFA regulations, Valcke said.

"'You have decided that after Blatter I am the head to be cut, fine, but don't use this $10 million because I haven't made any mistake with this,' he said."

FIFA

World Cup

On casting the emotions in the film

At the very beginning of this process we realized, "Man, we really don't know very much about this subject, so we better do some research." We started looking around online. We found some scientists who said that there are basically three emotions, others went up to 27, others had 16, somewhere in the middle, so we were kind of left with no definitive answer to our basic question, "How many are there?"

Dr. Paul Ekman who worked in San Francisco, still does, which is where Pixar Animation Studios is, he had early in his career identified six, that felt like a nice, manageable number of guys to design and write for. It was anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise. As I was sort of doodling I was thinking, "Surprise and fear — probably fairly similar." So let's just lose surprise and that left us with five.

On depicting Joy (played by Amy Poehler)

She said, 'Sorry, I just think it's really beautiful that you guys are making a story that tells kids that it's difficult to grow up and it's OK to be sad about it.' We were like, 'Quick! Write that down.'

Pete Docter on Mindy Kaling's reaction to the story

Joy we thought of as kind of an explosion or a spark. She's like an outwardly directed person who is just always moving and she's full of energy. Even the way she looks, if you look at her up close, and this is true of all of the emotions in the film, we wanted them to look not like little people — so they're not made of skin or flesh — they're made out of energy. They have these tiny little particles that sort of roil and move and that we felt was a good way of representing that.

On an emotional moment with Mindy Kaling (who plays Disgust)

She was actually pretty key to decoding some elements of the story. We were really wrestling with these two different themes of growing up and then embracing sadness, which we felt were kind of separate but I had an intuition that they could somehow be connected. I pitched her this story and as I turned around, because I was pitching kind of some visuals on the computer, and she's crying and I thought, "Oh no, did she get like a bad text or something?" She really responded emotionally and she said, "Sorry, I just think it's really beautiful that you guys are making a story that tells kids that it's difficult to grow up and it's OK to be sad about it." We were like, "Quick! Write that down." Because that was really what we were trying to say.

On the importance of Sadness

One of the other experts we consulted was this guy named Dacher Keltner. He was big on sadness as a community bonding, I think is the word he uses. Like if you're sad, it's a way of connecting with other people and a lot of times, we sort of feel embarrassed about being sad and we go off by ourselves to hide and cry by ourselves, but really it's a way of reestablishing relationship.

On the breakthrough he had with the film

We had spent almost three years working on the film and I knew that there was an upcoming screening where not only were we going to show it to everybody else at the studio. ... There was this really heavy pressure that whatever we were going to show had to be perfect or at least good enough to move into actual production. And yet, I was sitting there in editorial going, "This is not working."

I was walking around that weekend ... going, "I'm a failure. These other films were flukes. I don't know what I'm doing. I should just quit. What would I miss? I would miss my house and I'd miss going to work." But I think the thing that I realized I would miss most is probably similar to everybody, which is your friends. I thought about it and I realized that the friends that I feel the deepest connection with are the friends that yeah, I've had good times with, but they're also people I've been angry with, that I've had sadness alongside them, I've been scared for them, and it sort of hit me that the very subject matter of the film that I'm dealing with is the key to the most important thing in our lives — and that's our relationships.

We had done all this research showing the job of each individual emotion — fear keeps you safe, it deals with uncertainty; anger is about fairness, if it feels that you're getting ripped off or taken advantage of, that's when anger comes up; sadness deals with loss — and suddenly I had this new revelation, it felt like to me, that those are all true but the real deeper reason we have emotions is to connect us together and that felt big to me.

Movies

'Up' And Away With Pixar's Pete Docter

I suddenly had an idea that we had to get Fear out of there and Sadness connected with Joy, and I ran back, I called producer Jonas Rivera and Ronnie del Carmen who is our co-director, and we met that Sunday night and I went through this whole spiel with them and I was kind of expecting them to sink into their chairs and bury their hands in their faces because the pressure was pretty great. Instead they totally lit up. So the three of us went to ... the other [Pixar] filmmakers and we said, "Well, we were supposed to show you a screening today, but instead I'm going to tell you what we are planning to do." So the cool thing was they very quickly understood why and were totally on board, why this new thing was an improvement and so they got on board and we moved on. It was a scary moment but it was the right call in the long run.

On watching audience reactions

That's one of the real joys for me is going out and watching — and usually I'm not watching the screen, I'm kind of sitting and looking off to the side, spying on people to see what they react to. As [screenwriter] Joe Ranft used to say, "Animation is like telling a joke and waiting for three years to see if anyone laughs." ... This film seems like it really brings out a lot of discussion. There's a lot of layers to it.