Apple Music: Gone and forgotten

“Within 30 days after Apple Music debuted, Apple touted 11 million signups. But since they were for 90-day free trials, it meant, obviously, that had actually paid for the service,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “With contradictory surveys showing how many planned to actually keep their subscriptions active when it came due, the potential for success remained a huge question mark.”

“Well, on September 29th, I had to make a decision. Some of you simply turned off the auto-renew option so your Apple Music account wouldn’t renew. I realized I hadn’t done so. Not that $9.99 is that much money, although I can think of other purposes for it.,” Steinberg writes. “It turns out that I hadn’t touched any tracks from Apple Music in six weeks. Not a one. This doesn’t mean I didn’t launch iTunes, but every song I played, when I played anything, was something that I had already purchased. So why did I need to spend an extra $9.99 each month?”

“So the decision was inevitable. I decided to go without,” Steinberg writes. “Obviously, I’m far from the typical would-be Apple Music customer. I grew up buying music… and perhaps I’m just too old to change my ways, but there is something about owning music…”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Again, Apple Music is a service for music lovers, not music dabblers. Music lovers will find Apple Music to be invaluable.

That said, Apple Music certainly has issues.

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

SEE ALSO:
So far, Apple Music has failed; it’s very difficult to justify the monthly subscription – October 5, 2015