“While three months may seem a bit excessive, it’s a good thing the Apple Music trial period is lengthy because exploring the sheer volume of songs and features available can take hours or even days to parse,” Parker Wilhelm writes for TechRadar. “With so much to hear and not enough time in the day, we’ve assembled five of our favorite features that every newcomer should try in order to use Apple Music to the fullest.”
• Explore Apple’s curated playlists and create your own
• Go on a music video spree
• Follow your favorite acts with Connect
• Indecisive? Hit up Beats 1 Radio or the For You tab
• Spam the ‘heart’ button to unlock deeper cuts
Read more, and see the screenshots, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The more you “heart” the music you like, the better Apple Music gets.
maybe this hearting the music works for most, but i tried it with a couple of different 60s groups and the station often just repeats songs recently played without much variety. i used pandora for a while a couple of years ago and i thought it was a better way to discover stuff i didn’t know about. so i have a question. can you somehow type in the name of a group or artist and start a radio station based on that? for example, i don’t see any other way to create a station based on music similar to scott joplin. seems like i remember being ablr to do that on pandora. the starting groups of stations are pretty narrow in scope.
Yes, you always could type in an artist’s name and make a station based on that artist in iTunes. Still can.
Hard to explain how in words. Search on Scott Joplin, get a song playing, and next to the title of the song is a little icon with four dots “….” click on that and a menu appears offering, among other things, to create a station based on that song. Here’s what I get:
The Entertainer – Scott Joplin
The Entertainer (different version) – Scott Joplin
Pine Apple Rag – Scott Joplin
I’m Coming Virginia – Bix Beiderbecke
Ostrich Walk – Original Dixieland Jazz Band
It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie – Fats Waller (ragtime piano)
In a Sentimental Mood – John Coltrane
It all seems to be similar period music. 7 Scott Joplin albums did pop up with the original search and you can copy those for offline listening.
I’m keeping this station. Thanks!
Yup, you can make a radio station based on the artist. The problem is you run into the exact same scenario. You’ll get about 50 songs based on the radio station created by the artist and then they’ll start repeating. They will be a bit more fine tuned than a genre. ie. if you pick a heavy Artist like Metallica you will hear more bands like Pantera and Slayer vs. if you pick a band like Alice Cooper even though they all fall under the metal genre.
The heart feature works well for the “For you” section, but it really needs to influence the radio stations. People are lazy and they don’t want so much interaction and involvement discovering new artists they like, that’s WHY they are listening to radio.
I don’t like radio for two reasons:
1. There are tons of commercials.
2. The DJs talk over the beginning and ends of songs which I absolutely hate. That’s one of the reasons I can’t stand Beats 1 radio.
You’re listening to the wrong stations, obviously. Stay below 92 on the FM band. With limited exceptions, they are all commercial free, by statute.
I’ll stick with Sirius Radio for the time being while in the car. We need a better phone signal for Apple Music streaming on the go. I gave up on FM radio completely a long long time ago. Good to know about the low end of the FM dial, I’ll have to try that and see.
glad you like the station. btw fats waller’s music is considered generally to be harlem stride, stride or piano stride (named this way on the movements of the left hand), and evolved from ragtime, which pretty much died with scott joplin. if you like him then look into jazz piano which evolved partly from his style.
I’ll do that. Thanks!
It sucks! Just like all their attempts at services suck! They have had forever to make it work but still can’t get it right. Tim, heads need to roll.
EQ try an android phone or a MS phone. I am sure you will love what they have much better.
🙁
Thanks but I have a 6+. Have been a Mac guy forever. I’m just simply not a sheep. And the iPhone has nothing to do with music. Music is a service. And Apple simply cannot do services. No one is more disappointed than me.
EQ, I agree that iTunes music has a ways to go. its confusing, and some parts do not work well. See Eltritoma above. Same here. I am having trouble getting a station to give me good relevent artists. But I had the same problem with Pandora. Its idea of what an artist music is, is different than mine.
But I also have iTunes Match. About 2500 songs that I can jump to and get just what I want. So,” Forever to get it right”??? Just maybe a little over statement there.. ???
Yes they have had plenty of time. And iTunes match does not work well with music. Apple is trying to do too many things and isn’t doing any of them correctly.They do need to start over with iTunes and same goes for music. It’s Apple,that’s not Pandora and that’s not Spotify, it’s Apple. They aren’t some little start up company with few resources and lots of money. They’re Apple, “and it just works”. Well no it doesn’t. No excuses excepted.
Early today I got into some old reggae that I haven’t heard in ages. That was followed with a sprinkling of some 1970’s summer rock. Later in the day I asked Siri to recognize part of a song that was playing in a movie and she forwarded me to the full song in Apple Music. Bam!
You do certainly have to make an effort to interact with the software. It’s important to scroll down the main window in New or For You. There are a lot of playlists to try out. A lot will be so-so until the system starts getting to know your tastes better. Saying that my library is fully rated so that should be a good clue what my tastes are.
Off topic, I can not stand the current music app and if I could revert back to the version prior to the Apple Music launch, I would. The interface is insanely cluttered and basic stuff such as choosing your own playlist, shuffling songs, opening the radio, choosing stations, and having to scroll the bar up to reveal a song’s album cover with playback options is just so unintuitive now. Evening requires addtional steps & commands that were once in plain view as soon as you opened the music is now hidden elsewhere and in addition, the app crashes every so often on both my iPad Air and iPhone 5S.
I’m not the only one bragging about this but so are many users. I can only hope that Apple is listening closely to feedback from its users to rectify these issues.
You can also “heart” existing songs (that you own) in your iTunes library. There’s a new “Love” field for songs; you can show it as a column in a song list (with a heart symbol). I already have my favorite songs songs marked as “5 stars.” If you do that, or maintain a “Favorites” playlist, just “heart” all of those songs. Quick and easy way to give Apple Music a lot of input for its suggestions.
yes, i have all my 25,000+ songs rated from 1 to 5 stars in half star increments and playlists for various ratings (5 stars, greater than 4 stars, etc.). so i have hearted all my 5 star songs but that doesn’t seem to affect the radio, only the for you stuff. and the categories in the for you leave a lot to be desired. i assume that this will be improved with the next release or so, but right now it doesn’t work very well for someone like me whose music tastes span a wide range of music types. having only one radio station for classical is pretty funny.
Apple Music sucks like a Dyson.
Let us see what has transpired:
1- Apple starts with the largest, most successful an most profitable online music store in the world.
2- Apple buys for almost $3 Billion a me too music service tied to a marketer of shitty headphones favored my the notoriously fickle trendsters who would buy dog shit in bags if it had the ‘right’ logo on it.
3- Apple fucks up iTunes with an update that fixes what was not broken and ignores stuff desperately needing attention.
4- Apple puts the con men from the purchased shitty headphone company in a senior position of their music operation.
5- Apple launches a lame new music app that sucks even worse than previous versions and pushes rental music- a model soundly defeated in the marketplace by the “old” iTunes model.
So, they have spent a lot of money, wasted a lot of time, made mediocre software even worse, hired some hipsters for an online radio station and could only give away 10 million subscriptions on a user base in the hundreds of millions.
Someone needs to be fired. I would start with Mr Cue, who seems clueless.
FYI Apple needed to do a subscription service because consumer buying has changed.
Sales of music on iTunes has gone down that’s way they did Apple Music.
If you don’t like Apple Music then don’t use it!
There’s nothing stopping you just using iTunes and buying your music how you used to.
Personally I think Apple music is very good. It’s introduced me to all sorts of new music that I wouldn’t normally listen to.
They have ruined iTunes so as to make it a pain to use. On mobile it is a total waste- sacrificed to push a Zune- like rental model.
I’m glad I still have a few disc based iPods with lots of music on them. The new iTunes and iOS device players have broken the simple player model so that simply playing music just don’t work.
I would try Apple Music, but it isn’t on my primary music device, my Apple TV. Why?
Then there is the issue of it is “the music you love.” But “you” is Cue. Which sure isn’t me!