“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