Inside Apple Music Studios: A High-Touch Bet on Intimacy (EXCLUSIVE)
On Thursday night in Culver City, Los Angeles, Doja Cat lit a cigarette, ate a tiny bánh mì, queued up her songs on a MacBook, and told around 100 fans to stop worrying about the internet and “shake your ass” as she played her fifth studio album, Vie, to the public for the first time. The fans danced like hundreds of thousands of people weren’t watching on the livestream. A little more than an hour later, Doja and guest SZA were on the dancefloor as though they were at a basement party, no security cordon, no hierarchy, just a couple of friends moving Soul Train style, flanked by the crowd. For a moment, the lines between superfan and superstar appeared to dissolve. That was the point.
The scene capped a week in Los Angeles that belonged to the freshly opened Apple Music Studio, the company’s 15,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility dedicated to these kinds of fan-artist moments, and much more. On paper, the new studio boasts impressive specs: two radio stations built for Spatial Audio, mixing rooms, isolation booths, a 4,000-square-foot soundstage, and corridors lined with photos of a decade’s worth of Apple Music’s finest moments. In person, it felt like an engine for proximity, designed to make any fan who entered feel like an insider.
The studio was unveiled earlier this summer to coincide with Apple Music’s 10-year anniversary and opened to the public last week with three nights of shows from Gunna, JID, and Doja Cat. Across the week, the vibes and visuals radically shifted to suit each artist and their world, but the aim stayed constant: access. Not the “press pit” or “VIP at the back,” but a series of moments where fans felt seen and artists welcomed them into their world on their own terms.
The fans were selected based on different systems. Apple worked with each artist’s team to reach deep into the fanclubs associated with their acts, ensuring that only the biggest fans were in the room. Staff in sharp black suits lined up outside, holding doors and ushering guests through corridors typically reserved for the industry’s elite. Servers floated through the crowd with trays of drinks and hors d’oeuvres, but the real luxury was proximity.
The first night belonged to Gunna. Fans were ushered into the black-walled soundstage for a “One Night Only” celebration of his recent album The Last Wun. Backed by the 1500 or Nothin’ band, Gunna moved through the record while a pair of panties and a bra landed on stage in quick succession. Ebro Darden broke the set with a Q&A, questions gathered earlier via iPad and fielded live. When Gunna teased a joint project with Offset and promised a tour “soon soon,” it landed like privileged information.
“It was an honor to be the first to kick off Apple Music’s One Night Only and to open the stage at the new Soundstage,” Gunna said via email. “Breaking new ground with Apple and sharing it with the fans is truly history in the making.”
Night two was JID’s. His fans skewed a little different: deep-genre, cultish, obsessed with lyrical minutiae. The biggest cheer of the night came not from a song but from his answer to a question about who had the best verse on his Clipse-assisted track “Community.” After a pause, he admitted: “Malice. Just off the Jesus Shuttleworth line.” Reflecting on the night, JID said: “Feeling that close connection with the fans and sharing the new music live for the first time made [the night] truly unforgettable.”
Then came Doja Cat, heralding Apple Music Studios’ first-ever livestreamed album release party, designed for two audiences at once: the global feed, which made the space look like any other large venue, and the room itself, where it felt surprisingly small, intimate, and charged. Apple turned the soundstage into “Club Vie,” a neon-soaked Studio 54 fantasia complete with paparazzi-lined red carpet, limousine photo ops, and faux membership cards.
Rachel Newman, co-head of Apple Music, describes the studio as a physical statement of what the platform has been working toward since its inception: artist-first storytelling, deeper fan connection, and audio innovation. “They began as radio studios,” she explains, recalling Apple Music’s early Beats 1 outposts a little more than a decade ago. “But over the years, as we grew closer to artist communities, we were producing so much more: live performances, on-location interviews, visual storytelling. We outgrew the old spaces.” The Culver City hub reflects that evolution: a one-stop shop where artists can record, livestream, shoot content, and stage a fully branded rollout.
The studio may well be one of the company’s boldest moves in redefining what it means to create and drop music in our streaming age. At a time when every DSP is fighting over the same catalog, the new currency is intimacy. The Culver City launch was a flex, but also a blueprint: smaller, high-touch events that make fandom feel like a privilege, while other platforms are relying on depersonalized tools like data and AI.
Newman calls it storytelling. “We want to bring dimension back to music. Storytelling is important. Albums are important. Artists, and their careers, are important,” she says. Streaming, she admits, has “flattened everything out.” The studio is Apple’s counterweight, a way to create depth, context, and proximity — the feeling of being let in.
The soundstage itself functions as a blank canvas, fully adaptable to an artist’s vision. The facility is built for scale. Multiple events can run simultaneously without sound bleed. During Doja’s soundcheck, Ciara performed in another room, while engineers in one of the world’s loudest Spatial Audio suites mixed and mastered in real time.
If the future of music feels increasingly intangible, Apple’s bet is that moments like these — when stars and fans dance shoulder-to-shoulder — will matter most. While every DSP has the same catalog and functionality, the main thing that sets them apart is no longer access to music, but access to the artist.
