On its surface, Beats Music — which has $60 million in investment behind it and is an affiliate of Beats Electronics, the headphone company — is not radically different from Spotify, Rhapsody or any of the dozens of other music apps already out there. For $10 a month, it offers access to practically all the recorded music under the sun, with playlists galore to keep its customers tuned in. Since it has licensing deals with the same record labels as its competitors, it essentially has the same music, too.

Image Jimmy Iovine, far left, is the co-chairman and co-founder of Beats Music, a new streaming service (detailed in its app, top right) that has Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, as its chief creative officer. Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, another Iovine venture. Credit... Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

Instead of being a mere utility for music, though, Beats comes across as more a digital playground, or maybe a nightclub. Its interface, built primarily for mobile use, is full of sleek graphics over a jet-black background, and it is organized in four swipe-able panes that each deliver a constant feed of fresh songs in different ways, tailored to each user.

The idea is that bold visual appeal and the expertise of its programmers (or “curators,” in its preferred buzzspeak), in serving up just the right song or playlist, will create excitement among the millions of listeners who have been unseduced — or just confused — by streaming music.

“There’s so much music to hear online, people have become a bit deaf to the choices,” Bono of U2 wrote in an email. “Jimmy believes that Beats-style curation will become the discovery model that the music business is waiting for. I would never bet against him.”

To hear Mr. Iovine and his colleagues tell it, the world of online music is a letdown, full of bland websites, robotic recommendation programs and not enough soul in the machine. Pandora, for example, uses automated musicological analysis to decide what songs to play, and Spotify and others recommend music to users by parsing huge pools of data.

Ian Rogers, the chief executive of Beats Music, argued that these systems inevitably fail because they rely too heavily on computer algorithms and because the people behind them just misunderstand music. He cited one typical, so-obvious-it’s-wrong recommendation as proof of the problem: Paul Simon fan? Check out Art Garfunkel!