“I always resisted joining a music-subscription service,” Jason Snell writes for Apple Music. “I was comfortable liking what I liked, and buying new stuff from familiar artists as well as new stuff from artists I discovered… elsewhere, and didn’t see the value in an unending tap of music from every artist everywhere. The second was that I was concerned that by renting my music, I would end up trapped, with years of music discovery that would disappear (or have to be purchased at a high price) if I decided to cancel my subscription.”
Snell writes, “I’ve been a paying Apple Music subscriber for a year now, more or less, and I can report that my first complaint was completely wrong and my second was exactly right.”
“I was born and raised as a music consumer, buying tapes and CDs and MP3 downloads and adding them to my personal collection, but now I’ve embraced the subscription music future… and found myself trapped in it,” Snell writes. “It’s a luxurious sort of captivity, to be sure. But it’s captivity all the same.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, despite having to fight some rather appalling user interface issues, we’ve long since resigned ourselves to the fact that we’ll be ponying up monthly for Apple Music. It’s just too good a deal and, Jason is right, the A-Lists are excellent resources for music discovery.
Apple Music, quite possibly Apple’s most epic fail ever.
You forgot the </s> Many here may not get your sarcasm.
I just signed up and am using OS10 – loving it. the playlists are great – already subscribed to a few of them – i which there was a section for my subscribed playlists – the put them in with all my other’s
As I had just written in the other thread (about the slow death of Spotify and Pandora), I too am one of the converts, coming around from a vocal opponent of rental model (“We rent movies which we watch a few times in our entire life, but we buy music, because we listen to it every day”), to an ardent supporter of the subscription model.
If you imagine your lifetime music collection as a house, you could either build it slowly, over the years, by buying brick by brick and building it until it is done, or you could take out an interest-free lifetime loan and move in right away. And unlike a house, that is of a finite size, your Apple Music music collection is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited in size (OK, technically, it only has some 30 million tracks…).
Apple music is liberating. For those who want to discover new music, there are various curated playlists and channels. For people who know what they want, you simply search and download. Literally every album I ever could think of, I could find and download (or stream). I would have spent over $2,000 over the past year, just for the albums I had listened to on Apple Music, had I been forced to actually buy them.
Very nice analogy! I used to have 500 CD’s That is a lot but at 10 tracks per album only 5000 songs. I used to buy “an album a month” for roughly the amount I pay for my family subscription.
CD:
I can share with my kids
I own the album after I stop paying
Better sound quality if played on high End system
CD’s break / scratch (when shared)
CD’s have to be ripped to put on device
AM Family
AM I can share
Not 5000 but thousands of times more tracks to choose from (not all my kind but a fun way to explore IF you do that!)
Sound quality could be better (not always needed)
You clearly need to get a life mate.
??
I’m not sure what made you come to that conclusion; perhaps it is he number of albums I had heard over the past year, although I can’t see how is that strange. My daily commute takes about 90 minutes (total). Let’s say I work total of about 200 days in a year (with all the vacation, holidays and personal time off). I listen to music while on the bus, every morning and every afternoon. If an average album is one hour, that is already some 300 albums’ worth of music. On iTunes, that would have cost me $3,000, if I were to buy each one of them.
For someone who loves music, Apple Music is probably the best product Apple has ever introduced.
No service that makes a user feel trapped is a good thing.
Music rental is not a great way to discovery, it is just one more way for large corporations including Apple to “curate” what you see and hear. Its algorithms are poor, mostly date- and label-driven. An intelligent music listener would hear a great song and ask, who wrote that? who produced it? who was that great guitar player? In what studio was it recorded? What other great artists recorded that song?
Sad to say, but YouTube and similar sharing sites are a much better way to discover new talent, and for emerging artists to show what they can do. And you can also find some great deep cuts that Apple Music will never rent you.
Apple Music(app) is so horrible that I’m totally trapped.
It.
Sucks.
Horribly.
I’ve just discovered Bandcamp. It’s a damn shame I didn’t know about it much earlier. The fact that there is no longer _any_ free access to Music, I’ve totally given up on discovering things through iTunes. It’s nice that the internet radio part of it still works, though.
I love Apple Music. I would have loved it so much as a teenager when I listened to music way more.
The official Apple playlists in the For You section have already let me discover a lot of new music and fill gaps in my musical knowledge.
The sheer size of Apple Music (50 million songs, I heard) lets me search and hear amazing old songs I’ve read about.
It’s insanely great 🙂
You’re a fool Apple Music sucks. A five-year-old could’ve done a better job with that format.
Spotify is better. Once I get IOS10 I’m deleting that shit app along with them shit maps app.
MACWORLD…
Jason Snell writes for MacWorld!
You only just figured it out? Jason Snell is big in Mac journalism and celebrated in the Apple world for being so for many, many, many years.
What were you expecting? A Windows shill? A Linux loonie? The President of the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST user group to write the article?
Yes, Jason Snell writes for Macworld. Welcome to 1994 when he first started writing for MacUser magazine.
I mean, wow, you have uncovered the conspiracy of conspiracies! You, sir, have bested Alex Jones! We need to replace him pronto with… the WebMaster’sApprentice!
Yes! This is what we must do! It must happen due to your Watsonian skills of Sherlockian curiosity and problem solving.
I cannot wait for you to uncover and reveal, exclusively here at MDN, who actually shot JFK, where BigFoot is, where the Loch Ness Monster has been hiding, and that Obama is one of the black lizard people as opposed to the green ones, so that when he won the presidency as the first black man to get the job, he was also the first black alien lizard person to get it too.
This of course delivered Obama a Usain-bolt like double double, with the extra cherry on top being the Nobel Prize 7 or so years ago for saving the world even though he hadn’t done anything yet and had barely been in the job for 5 minutes.
Yes, webby, we are all here in awe of your incredible sleuthing skills, and we note your very kindly refresher reminder that Jason Snell gets paid for his words in Macworld magazine.
Never would have known if you hadn’t’ve said anything. Terribly kind of you to be so helpfully informative old chap.
Do remind us who Steve Jobs is next time. When the time is right, a refresher on who Tim Cook works for would be good, too.
If you know the name of the Samsung dude in charge who is the counterpart to Tim Cook, feel free to let us know that, too.
That one would probably be useful, I’d have to guess Kim-Chee Jong-Un Lee Park or something.
HEY EVERYONE! WEBBY FOUND OUT THE TRUTH THAT JASON SNELL IS A CELEBRATED MAC JOURNALIST AND WRITES FOR MACWORLD. IT’S A FIRKIN SCANDAL I TELL YA! WEBBY HAS UNCOVERED IT!
ALL HAIL WEBBY! DELIVERER OR TRUTH! (and truth about the lizard people!)