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“Into the unknown we go,” the D.J. Zane Lowe said just after noon on Tuesday, as he began his first show on Beats 1, the Internet radio station that is a big feature of Apple’s new music service, Ben Sisario reports.

Many in the music industry may have been thinking the same thing. The new service, Apple Music, is the most thorough change to the company’s audio offerings since it introduced the iTunes store in 2003, a move that legitimized a nascent digital market and eventually led to a computer manufacturer becoming the world’s largest retailer of music.

As Apple Music opened on Tuesday — most listeners found it as part of an update of Apple’s mobile operating system — much of the attention turned to Beats 1, a live radio feed that in some ways functions as marketing for the entire service.

Apple Music is competing directly with a range of online streaming music outlets. Like Spotify, it is offering $10 monthly subscriptions that let people stream any song they choose out of a catalog of tens of millions. Like SoundCloud, it lets artists upload brand new or unofficial tracks, and like Pandora, it offers Internet radio feeds that cater to a user’s tastes. Read more »