“On April 28, 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, saving the music industry from the scourge of piracy while creating a large and steady source of revenue for Apple,” Om Malik writes for The New Yorker. “Thirteen years later, however, what started as a simple and intuitive way to find music has become a cluttered festoonery of features.”
“As Apple begins competing with focussed streaming services like Spotify, the company’s strategy of tacking new services, like Apple Music, which became available last year, onto already bloated software has made the experience of using the application more and more unpleasant,” Malik writes. “So when Apple said that it would release a new streamlined version of Apple Music at its developers’ conference next month, it seemed as though the company was finally reckoning with the confusion in its music services.”
“Apple may, in fact, clear up some of the mess and present a simpler solution, but its struggles in the delivery of music are merely a symptom of a deeper problem: how to provide Internet services,” Malik writes. “[Apple’s] hardware-centric approach is extended to software, with big-bang releases once or twice a year…. But, when it comes to Internet services, a yearly release cycle feels dated. To perform well, these services need constant tinkering based on how people are actually using them.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote in January 2015:
Frankly, we don’t need a new Mac or iPhone/iPad operating system every year and Apple Inc. doesn’t need it, either. Annual OS releases shouldn’t be mandated. What we all really need, customers and Apple Inc., are operating systems that are rock solid and do what they’re supposed to do when they’re supposed to do it. Why not just add new features/services to existing OSes with continued point releases that refine and extend the experiences and services you want to deliver? Why not just release new operating systems only when they are rock solid and ready?
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I know one thing I will be long dead before you trolls offer up anything new, intelligent or original, let alone sane.
STOP calling people that don’t agree with you ‘trolls’.
For the first time in two decades I have stopped purchasing new Apple gear.
Ease of use of all their products and services has gone down dramatically since Cook took over.
Innovation at Apple has basically ground to a halt.
The last few years of keynotes have been a complete snooze fest.
Apple Music is a confusing mess.
Our Apple TV has to be reset every few days, and you can only do that by pulling out the power cord.
iOS 9.3 is bug ridden garbage.
The list of disappointments goes on and on and on and I have essentially stopped recommending Apple anything to anybody.
One star for Cook.
There’s a common denominator: Eddie Cue.
Remove/replace him with someone competent and they’ll do much better.
Is Apple becoming the new Microsoft?
That’s hilarious …
Even Microsoft has never been as bad as Apple has now become!
This guy is spot on. I signed up for Apple Music on DAY 1. Like most, I found the experience with Apple Music to be horrible, absolutely horrible. It is a profoundly awful piece of software, but I stuck with it because I’ve been with Apple my whole life, since my first Mac, the SE/30.
Then, I became a paying subscriber of Apple Music and waited for what I thought would be inevitable; an update that would try to add some degree of usability to Apple Music.
Month after month after month, nothing from Apple. Countless articles, a seemingly unending series of writers all writing about how miserable Apple Music is. Nothing from Apple.
Why did Apple wait so long? Why make people suffer from their mistakes?
I’ve grown used to all the things I hate about Apple Music. I’m sure Spotify is much, much better, but I’m committed to Apple so I’ll just keep suffering along. (Hundreds and hundreds of my album artwork went missing all due to Apple Music.)
But I am no longer the Apple evangelist that I used to be during the Jobs era. Not even close.
Apple Music is not perfect by any means, but an old Dad like me has no trouble navigating around and listening to whatever music my heart desires. I don’t really understand why people struggle with Apple Music. It’s not that hard. Rough around certain edges? Sure, but difficult to use, no.
“Why did Apple wait so long? Why make people suffer from their mistakes?”
I can only assume that part of the reason Apple let it go this long is because of attitudes like yours – ” … I’m sure Spotify is much, much better, but I’m committed to Apple so I’ll just keep suffering along.”
If something else is better, use it instead. You can still use Spotify on your Mac, so I absolutely do not understand why you stick with something that makes you miserable, and resulted in “… Hundreds and hundreds of my album artwork [going] missing all due to Apple Music.”
If Apple started losing droves of users to Spotify, you can be pretty sure they’d fix the issue.
If you just stick with it, and make yourself miserable, you allow Apple too be complacent, and become part of the problem – not the solution.
Sat out on the deck with friends last Saturday evening, enjoying a round robin of requests for hours.
Music works.
Apple is tone-deaf where music is concerned. I made lots of purchases from the iTunes store, all in specific niche genres. Unlike Amazon, Apple doesn’t recognize this and present me with options that might interest me when I return to the store. Instead, it presents what interests the kids at Apple. There is no chance I would ever buy any of the stuff which is promoted at the top level. Is it there because placement is paid for? Probably. Would I ever let Apple choose someone to “curate” my music? Never. I now make my purchases on Amazon, where I get a download AND a CD. And I use the front-end on my Sonos system in place of the iTunes interface. And yet Apple DOES understand the other side of music–its Logic is the best sequencer out there. But I still no longer automatically upgrade anything from Apple, because the chance of failure is too high. What has happened?
I only use Siri to play for Apple Music. Being able to play nearly any album by request, from old stuff to brand new releases, makes it worth $10 a month for me. The visual and touch interface for Apple Music, however, is terrible. I avoid using that whenever possible. Picking music should be way simpler and more fun than that. I don’t think Steve Jobs would have tolerated the way the Apple Music app works today.
I have had no problems with Apple Music (French iTunes family subscriber)’ works like a charm. AppleTV 4 is not living up to its promise on the tOS: watched shows are cued up, even from previous seasons even after I go into iTunes and mark them watched AGAIN.
I do believe that Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller need to move on. Tim needs to mandate that imperfection will not be rewarded.
Apple’s core competence used to be recruitment. They are making changes there and I hope that it pays off. But the quality of the Apple staff has definitely gone down where software is concerned and frankly, iMac and the Mac Pro need to be rethought out. Jony is strangely invisible these days, maybe because he is reinventing the car? I hope so but we’ll see.
Good point about OS releases MDN. The new OS every year is a far less important event than new hardware. Apple could stagger OS updates throughout the year as “surprises” in between new hardware announcements.
Apple of the past realized that software was not their forte and split off Claris. It is time for that realization again. Split off a services division and please take the whole rent coercion scheme with it. Put Eddy Cue in charge. Then go back to making great solid, upgradeable Macintosh computers.
“What we all really need, customers and Apple Inc., are operating systems that are rock solid and do what they’re supposed to do when they’re supposed to do it.”
Basically, we haven’t had that since Snow Leopard!