“I’ve done my very best to feed Apple Music more than a typical month’s worth of data in a week’s use by religiously using the feedback options – Love, Add to My Music or Make Available Offline – on every applicable track,” Ben Lovejoy writes for 9to5Mac. “I’ve essentially treated Apple Music as a student at summer cramming school.”
“Unlike a teacher, I haven’t been able to offer it any negative feedback through iTunes – pointing out tracks I hate (not even for the playlist that included a Justin Timberlake track!). This is especially odd given that you can do so from a long-hold in iOS, and on the Watch,” Lovejoy writes. “I’m just hoping that it draws the right conclusion when I skip a track a short way into it. I agree with Jordan that the very fact that Apple had to use The Loop to issue a (partial) explanation about how to provide music feedback shows just how messy and unintuitive it is.”
“But clunkiness of the feedback mechanism aside, how well is it doing? The answer is: rather well – and not quite in the way I expected it to,” Lovejoy writes. “At first, I thought it wasn’t as good as Spotify at music suggestions, but I’ve since concluded that – if the primary aim of a streaming music service is discovering new artists – it’s actually much better. And Apple’s much-vaunted human curation is probably responsible… We’ll see in three months’ time, when I need to decide whether or not to fork over cold, hard cash, but right now I think I’m going to. I’ve cancelled my Spotify subscription, and (radio stations aside) am currently using Apple Music as my sole music streaming service.”
Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: How are you liking Apple Music so far? Has anyone figured out how each of the parts works and in conjunction (or not) with each other?
Screw your UI troubles. Just relax, sit back and enjoy the goddam fine music and awesome playlists
Wrong answer. If something is a pain to use, I don’t use it. Period.
I’m keeping it. A few bumps the first week; most user error frankly.
But, learning new shit keeps you young.
For You loves me (and you)
I like it. Still now sure how to create certain types of playlist.
I just cancelled my Spotify account.
I wish there was a way for me to import my Spotify playlist into Apple Music.
I also like it very much. Actually more than I expected to. The recommendations have been delightful.
I’m still exploring it, but so far I am very impressed.
I was quite impressed with the radio station I created for my wife (a Bon Jovi radio station – not a fan myself but my wife loves their music). The other artists and songs that were chosen for the Bon Jovi radio station where so dead on with my wife’s tastes it was uncanny. She listened to this the whole weekend (needed my headphones to drown it out with something else).
It’s like a musical smorgasbord! So much free music now, I find myself unsure of what to listen to next. I find Beats1 less attractive because I never know when to listen to it, and finding out what’s coming (using the Tumblr page) is too cumbersome.
My problem is when looking through my artists that I own, it doesn’t show what is available in the apple music side of things…. But when I look up that artist in apple music and then go back to the artists on my phone and look on that specific artist I looked up, it will then show what is in my music and then what is in Apple music. I would prefer all my artist have my music choices and then what is in Apple music
I like the curated playlists quite a bit and I find that I am listening to music much more. I typically listen to NPR most the day and loud music in the afternoon when I need a little energy. Apples “For You” offers up a nice selection and I find I am listening to more of an artists work rather than the few songs that I would choose to purchase.
I still like spotify a lot more
For what reason?
Well, for one, playlists and offline listening work flawlessly on Spotify, whereas Apple Music continuously grays out songs on my playlists, refuses to play them even though I can play them by navigating to the full album, and won’t hold songs for offline listening.
I haven’t joined Apple Music for the same reason I (could) never buy iTunes Match: the 25,000 track limit. Until Apple raises that to the 100,000 they are talking about, I can’t use iCloud Music Library, and without that Apple Music is really no different than Spotify. I’ll have to reserve my opinion on which is better for now.