At 8:23 AM local time on Tuesday morning, in Los Angeles, there he was: Zane Lowe, the British DJ Apple hired so mysteriously from BBC 1 earlier this year, on the ones and twos. "Check. Test. Test-test-test-test-37 minutes-test. How's that?" Underneath his voice, which he may or may not have known was broadcasting live to potentially hundreds of millions of people around the world, Brian Eno's ultra-ambient "Music for Airports" was playing.

At 8:41, he did a roll call. "Okay London!" "All right, loud and clear," came the callback. Everything was good, and Lowe's voice began to relax.

At 8:56, he laughed. Just once. "Five minutes," he said.

At 9:01 (late!), Lowe was back. He sounded different now. More confident, talking faster. "All right man, we gotta kick this thing off at some point." After a brief, simple introduction, Lowe put on the first song in the history of his huge new project: "City," by U.K. band Spring King. A jaunty rock song that sounds a little like a lot of the other jaunty rock Zane Lowe has broken before. Just before he turned up the volume to let the song ride, Lowe reminded the world: "We're Beats 1, we're worldwide, and from now on, we're always on!"

Beats 1 is... well, it's basically just an Internet radio station. It's also the centerpiece of Apple Music, the momentous new project for Apple, its latest attempt to revolutionize the way we discover and listen to music.

Apple

Let's just get this out of the way: There's nothing here you haven't seen before. But you can forgive (and expect) a certain amount of swaggering bravado from Apple when it comes to music. Ever since it launched iTunes in 2001, it has effectively owned the attention of the music industry. From the now-ubiquitous white earbuds to the iPods that hundreds of millions of people owned, there's no more important company in music than Apple. And, correctly or otherwise, it fancies Apple Music an equally important milestone in the history of music.

First, though, money. You can't get much of anywhere in Apple Music without agreeing to pay $9.99 a month (or $14.99 for a family plan) once this three-month trial ends. There are going to be millions of people who wind up paying 10 bucks a month for a service they never use again, because it is really, really hard to find out how to cancel. (It is possible, though.)

Once you get in, you see a fairly familiar Music app. It all looks more or less the same, except every section page looks like the Radio page from before, with a featured section at the top and then an alphabetical list of albums, songs, or whatever you're looking at.

There are five sections: For You, New, Radio, Connect, and My Music. If you have any music in your iTunes collection—and you almost certainly do—it'll show up in My Music. (Remember, this completely replaces the iTunes and Music experiences you've had before.) You can safely ignore Connect, at least for now. Based on the first showing, it's just a pretty Instagram page where a handful of artists can share videos and fans can leave emoji comments (that no artist will ever actually see). New is about—surprise—new music. My Music is your library, both music you already own and music you've saved or downloaded from Apple Music's 30-million-song library.

Apple Music's greatest potential is as a music-discovery engine. It knows what you listen to, and what you like—when you first tap on For You, you have to go through the Apple Music Wall of Bubbles, a paralyzing screen where you tap on music you like, double-tap on music you really like, and ignore with great disdain artists and genres you don't want to see in Apple Music. Then, Apple's computers and its team of music lovers are programming playlists and radio stations designed to find you more music you'll like.

You can listen to Lowe, a legend in the biz when it comes to breaking new artists. You can check out one of the human-curated playlists, which will shuffle every day. You can listen to an automated radio station based on a song you like or a song you heard on one of the radio stations, which will play an endless list of songs you might also like. Or, you can check out the recommendations Apple Music will make based on what you've listened to, which so far seem spot-on as long as you're honest about liking OneRepublic. Everything is shareable, searchable, and constantly accessible.

The first steps—the music library, the radio station—that's all free forever. But when you pay, you get on-demand access to any song in Apple Music's 30-million-song library. And if Apple Music does one thing well, it's make the case for paying. Beats 1 is just barely enough to give you a taste of the cake; the whole Apple Music experience is like having a baker move into your house. You say "huh, I like this Future guy, what else has he done?" Apple Music has it all, right there, tantalizingly close—all it needs is your iTunes password and $120 a year.

It's not quite airtight yet, though. Why can you only heart a song playing on Beats 1 sometimes? And why can't you see what was on two or 10 minutes ago, or what's coming up next? Which radio stations are human-curated, and which are made by machines? You never get a sense exactly of where you are, or how you got there. If context is everything—and Apple Music is betting big that it is—the parts of the app that don't involve Lowe need a lot more of it.

It's hard to know quite what to make of Apple Music so far. On one hand, it's a giant, sprawling, ambitious project, a combination of Pandora, Spotify, Slacker, Songza, Rdio, Beats Music and, I don't know, Z100. All we're missing is Howard Stern, and hey, I wouldn't be that surprised if he showed up. ESPN Radio is already here. Nobody's ever done anything this big before. If I weren't already a Spotify user, I don't know what would make me choose it over Apple Music.

But there's also nothing about Apple Music that's particularly remarkable. It's like shiny new packaging on an old idea. And the app does so much that it gets really hard to navigate, and there's often not enough information. And if you have a giant library of playlists or songs, search becomes your only hope. That's where Siri comes in: The search is actually really powerful, able to do things like "play songs featuring Nicki Minaj" and "play top 40 music," though Siri's usual hearing and processing problems certainly apply.

Where Apple Music will really set itself apart is with exclusives from artists, with shows on Beats 1, and with the success of Connect. Exactly none of those are guaranteed—or even necessarily likely—and without them Apple Music's only real advantage is that it's already installed on your phone when you get it. (Which is, to be fair, a big advantage.)

Giving people access to music isn't enough anymore. Apple has to prove it can be better at finding music, sharing music, and connecting people to music than anyone else. That's a lot harder than selling MP3s.