“For many Apple users, October’s credit card statement will be the first that has an entry on it for Apple Music,” Ewan Spence writes for Forbes. “With the ninety-day free trial rolling over to a paid subscription, this is the key moment for Apple Music. Will people continue to stay subscribed to Apple’s model of a subscription music service? Has the service delivered enough value? Does it compare favourably to the current leading players? Personally, the answer is no.”
“Close to four months have passed since launch, and the Apple Music experience has not been improved in any substantial way. The package that Apple delivered out of the box was horribly mainstream, with a huge focus on popular artists,” Spence writes. “Having seen countless people set up their Apple Music profile when they were forced to move to the updated Music app in iOS 8.4, I’d be confident that every single Apple Music user was offered Taylor Swift as a musical recommendation. Those bubbles forced mainstream pop music recommendation into everyone’s system, so is it any wonder I’m offered Katy Perry, One Direction, and Miley Cyrus, when a quick glance through my music collection would show that a focus on more Progressive Rock and East European Dance music would be more appropriate?”
“There is no app in the world that is perfect, but the new iOS Music app is a sprawling mess, it can easily hang on opening if it can’t find a solid internet connection, and it makes it harder to search and locate your own music on a handset. Album and Artist lists are compressed into a single drop down box, while Apple’s attempt at a global radio station is given a tab all on its own. Prioritising Zane Lowe’s vanity project over easy access to my own music collection is a courageous call for Apple to make,” Spence writes. “And that’s before I look at the bloated bolt-on nature of Apple Music in the iTunes desktop app. It’s just painful to navigate.”
“It also completely ignores the connected experience of music online,” Spence writes. “Sharing tracks, playlists, and curating from multiple sources and networks is part of listening to music now, and Apple as yet does not have an easy route to work with countless musical moments.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s a service for music lovers, not music dabblers. If you do not use the “heart” to like what you like, then, unsurprisingly, Apple Music recommendations will not work very well for you.
That said, Apple Music certainly is a clusterfsck. (There’s a quote you won’t be seeing on the big screen during Apple’s next keynote address.)
One thing, among many, that Apple needs to fix in Apple Music:
In iTunes Store, you can easily see which songs are most popular on an album or for each artist. When you look at an album in Apple Music, there is no popularity rating. Apple need to simply use the iTunes Store data in those views. Call it ‘iTunes Store Popularity.” It gives the listener cues as to where to start sampling a new album. Whatever the reasoning for not including that individual track popularity measure in Apple Music, if there is a reason and not just another oversight, it is wrong.Another thing Apple needs to fix in Apple Music:
If a user is an Apple Music member, there should obviously be NO 1:30 PER TRACK PREVIEW FOR APPLE MUSIC MEMBERS. Why force subscribers to switch over and hunt for the track in Apple Music so that they can play the whole song to which they are already entitled? You know they are subscribers, Apple. It’s extraordinarily stupid to limit subscribers in this way. It’s frustrating. It makes us not want to bother. It’s a wrongheaded impediment to music discovery. We’ve paid for the entire track to stream unlimited. Let us.There are countless other niggles that we have with Apple Music that, frankly, should not have been there in a properly-managed, properly-tested product at launch much less continue to exist today.
To turn off Apple Music’s automoatic renewal:
In iTunes:
1. Click on your account
2. Select “Account Info”
3. Select Settings>Subscriptions and click “Manage”
4. Set Automatic Renewal to “Off”In iOS’ Apple Music app:
1. Tap your account
2. Tap “View Apple ID”
3. Select Subscriptions and tap “Manage”
4. Hit the toggle button to turn of automatic renewal
I pay $23 a year for iTunes Match so I already get ad-free radio. I know Apple Music kind of puts the whole world of music at my fingertips, but in practice Apple’s radio stations aren’t that different from their recommended Apple Music playlists. No $10/month from me.
I recently bought Amazon Prime when it was $67. Their music app is a pleasant surprise. I’ve bought enough CDs and even streaming music from Amazon so it already knows my tastes better than Apple Music did, and I’ve bought hundreds of tracks and albums from Apple.
The four in our family are very happy with Apple Music. We’re all exploring new music as never before. For the kids especially, it’s been great. I’m returning to listening to new music again too. The interface is fine to me. I think it’s a tough interface to get right, so that everyone likes it. Some people will never be satisfied with it.
In the olden days people purchased music on compact disks, cassette tapes, 8-track tapes, reel-to-reel tapes and vinyl records. People would also have large parties and music would get lost. I’ve “lost” A LOT of music over the years. Tonight, I put together a playlist of some of this music. If you have Apple Music you can listen to it, otherwise you are shit out of luck.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/playlist/stuff-that-i-lost-over-years/idpl.6c1fe0dc52d347e184e8b0cd228ad727
I’m very happy with Apple Music, I have over 600 CDs, purchased/downloaded high-quality music files, and I’m using the family plan. All these things are working very well together. I can listen to the music I own, I can try a lot of different music that I would never purchase, and the list goes on… I think this article is BS. As for the 30 second stream…. If you listen to the same music in NEW there is no 30 second stream… you are able to listen to the whole song. If you go to iTunes Store, there is a 30 second stream on music. It seems you did not do you due diligence in researching for this article.
I prefer to be my own DJ, thanks. I don’t rent music. Now would Apple please allow me to remove it and clean up the classic iTunes interface? How about distributing ALAC files in iTunes already?