Why Apple Music is So Bad When the iPhone is so Good
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I was there for the transition. IT wasn't all that much of a transition. Netflix was always a company that was digital and used data to make decisions. We just switch from delivering disks to bits and then had a whole lot more data to work with.
Apple would need a DNA change -- they treat their services as lead gen for hardware sales, as the article mentions.
There is no secret, other than they would need to treat their internet services as a first class citizen along with their hardware group, instead of as something to make their hardware worth more. But that would mean acknowledging that there are other hardware platforms out there.
One of the main reason Netflix is currently beating a lot of the other players is because they work on so many different kinds of hardware from many competing companies.
If Apple bought Netflix (as this article suggests), it would kill Netflix unless they let them keep making a 1st class Android app. And that is what Apple has to do if they want their internet services to be taken seriously -- they have to start acting like Apple hardware isn't the only hardware out there, and also that maybe people aren't only using Apple apps on their iPhones.
(set|stop) clock (for|at) ([0-9])(AM|PM)
which improves recognition, as opposed to scrolling through wheels to select the right time as you would with a GUI.
I suspect it'll get better as they sign more deals and/or produce more of their own content.
This may or may not be obvious to people within the US.
I guess this also explains why Apple doesn't make a web-based version of iTunes (similar to Spotify's web player or Google Play Music) or even the Mac App Store?
Good or bad as they are, their whole point is their system integration -- installing apps, managing your music library etc. Not merely browsing and downloading to "Downloads" folder.
Thats why they probably focus on an icar. Also hardware. Where they can make the biggest margin.
1. No, I don't want my iPod to use Apple Music by default. I'm carrying a device with 20GB of music on it, I don't need you to search for a wifi signal on this train and then try to connect with my non-existent Apple Music account. And there's no way to shift this default setting to use the iPod internally-stored music.
2. Two days ago, I took a deep breath and tried to sync iTunes with my iPod for the first time in 6 months. All I wanted to do was move my one newly-purchased album that iTunes had (the new Radiohead, if you want to know) onto my iPod. I still don't know what happened but it ended up deleting all my music, which then required a full sync to move those 20GB back onto my iPod (which, as a reminder, is a device designed to play music.)
- Syncing an album for offline play is a checkbox.
- I can play music on any device logged into the account from any other device logged into the account
- Robust song discovery
- Massive back-catalog
- HD Playback
It's absurd that iTunes, my phone's native media player, is worse than a third-party app.
Spotify is the best for discovering new music from other users. Apple is great because of Beats 1 and their curated playlists. But the core features are basically identical.
I guess you've never experienced rdio? There we had a real thriving community of music lovers. Albums were discussed in comments under the item in questions, comments were rated, replies could be added. Popular and recent comments of your friends were featured on your frontpage. The heavy rotation section revealed a single users' (or a group for that matter) current taste at a glance, I could start any user's personal radio station.
Compared to that Spotify is a social tragedy - the activity tab has to be one of the most disappointing areas of the service. I can shout, but nobody can get back to me or discuss anything there.
Apple's UI for the Music app is practically unusable compared to Spotify's. They make it so bloody hard to find anything. One screen contains 4 different actions, with a tiny half-height panel being swipeable to get at critical functionality that should be on a dedicated screen. It's not a professional interface.
>> Apple is great because of Beats 1
... if I wanted radio I would subscribe to Sirius. I'm not going to pay $10+/month for a single radio station.
This is the only reason for me sticking with Spotify instead of Apple Music. It lets me have the Spotify app running on my htpc and I can easily control it from any device running Spotify. No need for AirPlay, Bluetooth etc.
Issue 2: iTunes being so terrible is probably the best argument against resolving Issue 1.
I believe the default is not to automatically use Apple Music, though, and rather to prompt the user to try it. I know that I declined, and haven't seen it since.
Though the iOS Music app has been getting worse every year regardless. I keep meaning to write a replacement that just operates mostly the way it did until iOS 6 or 7.
We should partner up and procrastinate together.
I would join that club.
"Displacement Activity Swap Shop" http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Displacement_20Activity_20Swa...
I was secretly hoping that somebody would post the solution to the problem, so I just excitedly opened up the Music section on my Ipod touch...only to find that there is no "Show Apple Music" slider. I just googled it again and found a page with your same solution[0] which says it should work on the ipod and includes a screenshot, but my ipod doesn't have that section. When I get home, I'll try disabling Apple Music on iTunes to see if that works.
I love living in the future.
[0]http://osxdaily.com/2015/07/31/hide-apple-music-ios-itunes/
Settings App -> General -> Restrictions -> Apple Music Connect (toggle to off)
So the trick is to first enable Restrictions, then toggle off Apple Music Connect, then do what bydo says in his comment above (Settings App -> Music -> Show Apple Music (off)).
Pretty intuitive really. Great work everybody.
When I go to the "For You" section of the music app, more often than not I'm greeted with albums I already have in my library, playlists titled "Intro to <artist I already listen to>", or random curated playlists that I've recently browsed through. Basically, it gives me nothing valuable on a regular basis. I find it very hard to discover new music with Apple Music. With Spotify, there was my "Discover Weekly" playlist which was perfect - 30 new songs that I should like given my listening history. And Spotify was fairly good at recommending new playlists to me as well.
Perhaps with Apple Music I'm taking the wrong approach. It might be more effective to use Radio for discovery, but for being based on Beats the curated playlists seem really lacking.
I take it you haven't tried discover weekly, then?
To be fair, it needs a fair bit of listening history to start making recommendations. But it is ridiculously good. Since what you will like isn't a deterministic function of your listening history, it has to take some chances, you have to accept that it won't always hit. When it does, though, oh boy.
I grew up with radio, and I used to like to listen to the college stations where there was no format and the selections came from the personal taste of another person. On Apple Music, the curated playlists are OK in that respect. Also, since I live in Japan, the "Top 100" lists change really quickly and can include some interesting and surprising discoveries.
My gripe isn't so much with the efficacy of recommendation engines, anyway. I'm complaining about the lack of useful basic search/sort/filtering. I would say about 50% of the searches that I run on Apple Music end with a blank artist placeholder page, or re-route me into the iTunes Store, or pull up totally irrelevant results, or otherwise end in confusion because there app, the store, the library, and the streaming service are all whipped up into a tangle that no one can seriously be expected to navigate.
Spotify absolutely kills Apple Music when it comes to their core and community generated playlists. But I absolutely love Beats 1 so keep using it because of that.
Streaming? Just treat it as a playlist. Remember a song off a stream? Make that be like an adhoc playlist. Just let me mash a button and play music. Let me hit a button, and it remembers the current song. Want to let me pick a stream? Let me navigate just a few steps down a menu and pick something. Hit play. Music. Done.
The really confusing/annoying thing for me is there's no history AFAIK. So no looking up the previous song if you didn't get to hit the heart button because you were driving. Even finding a previous streaming/radio playlist is impossible sometimes. Click away from it, and now how do you get back? On the iPad: You don't AFAICT. Best you can do is bring up the Up Next list if you don't remember the search/navigation that found the playlist in the first place.
And wow... Discoverability--
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3bprla/apple_music_w...
I assumed it was just a "genius" thing at first as well, but there they are. Maybe it's new.
In any case count me out. I'm on the brink of dumping Apple for all music. I hate things on principle that feel like they're designed to "guide me" toward a desired "consumer behavior."
I also hate what this does to music. Music isn't meaningful in this model. It's a formless uniform commodity that you consume on demand. Maybe that works for disposable pop that all sounds the same but not for music you care about.
This is definitely why. It's also why Apple barely pays attention to the iPod line and hasn't shown any interest in making a large storage device like the iPod classic (which I foolishly sold!).
I recently went through all the major ones (that is one way to get a few months free streaming) on my Android and there really isn't much of a difference except for the curated lists.
I recently switched to Play Music, because they seem to be much friendlier to my battery life than Spotify. I also prefer their algorithmic discovery features to Spotify's primarily human-curated approach (which inherently favours what's mainstream over what I like).
This might explain why they seem overly weighted towards Swedish music in my DW.
I wish there was an official Play app on the desktop, but the third party ones work pretty well (I really only need the keyboard shortcuts). The Play iOS app is fantastic and quick.
I'd prefer to have a standalone client as well, but the keyboard shortcuts work fine for me with just the web app. Chrome on Linux and Windows.
I'd imagine that integration of Beats into iTunes didn't start in earnest before the Beats acquisition was final, which was sometime Q4 2014? That gave essentially 6 months for the integration?
When you think about what's involved in that task, it's probably even more amazing that it even works as well as it does.
Except Apple stuff is generally quality. My macbook pro is still the best laptop I have ever used 3 years later.
Not sure why I was downvoted, you can search online and see analysts questioning the streaming service deal because of the licensing being unlikely to carry over post-purchase. You can also see them chiming in on massive margins that Beats makes from their headphones and how it helps Apple seal more of the supply chain. The headphones were clearly the play, not Beats Music.
The fact that both the Spotify and Google Play iOS apps perform better and are easier to understand from a UX perspective is embarrassing for Apple.
Spotify is such a far superior service, it works exactly as you'd expect it to, it has a free tier and a paid tier, it's basically as good as it gets for a music streaming service.
(To be fair, Pandora is better than the others, but dependent on genre. It does really well with classical music. With lots of electronica/electronica related music -- very annoying.)
I can't think of anything that Apple Music is great for, which is not very Apple-like.
The Spotify equivalent of "For You" is where I'm having the most luck. Maybe I'll give Apple another go.
Funnily enough, it has recommended a lot of British Isles trad/folk to me, (and also Québécois, for some reason) most of which is OK but some of which is really interesting. It's found several long medieval ballads, which I would have thought was far too niche to recommend.
Obviously there's a lot of personal preference here. Add in that Google has a TON of info on me, way more than Spotify could ever have, and it's almost not a fair comparison. I should mention that I left Spotify because they have a 10,000-songs limit on how many songs you can save, even with a paid account, and that was absolutely absurd to me- IIRC, Google lets you actually upload more tracks than Spotify would let you save.
Rdio had some really creative curation features. The "What's Hot" feature, which was a current hits list of what your friends like and are listening to was really amazing.
Their auto-play radio feature (it would start playing similar music based on what you just finished listening to) was great.
And lastly their "adventurous" slider, which allowed the radio station song search to land somewhere in the spectrum of just songs in your collection to new stuff you didn't have but was in some way related to the current radio station being played....man.....this feature alone was worth the whole subscription in my opinion.
One byproduct? It seems that Google Play's CDN and DRM handling, not to mention caching, is way superior to Spotify. Whether I am on wifi, LTE, or getting in my car and therefore in between the two, hitting play on Google Play will always result in a song playing within two seconds.
On Spotify, it's more like 10 seconds. And it may not play at all. It may be stuck reauthing my account. It may be stuck in a stateless DRM hypoxia where every track is greyed out, although I am authenticated. It's impossible to predict.
I think Spotify built a really cool 2007-era P2P infrastructure. Then turned it off. And never tried to think beyond the state of the art since then.
On a serious note, why is that Apple services are so... lacking?
Made a comparison spreadsheet there: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ptV0sWO2tBT4c3G8aiB0...
It's a race to the bottom between Apple and Microsoft. I omit Google as I do not really have any experience with their OS. Are they doing less nagging for their services?
If you buy a (Nexus) Android device, the device comes preloaded with all the Google services and apps, but you are only nagged about two things:
1. log in with a Google Account (for Play Store, Gmail, Calendar and all the others), and 2. Opting in to Google Location services.
That's about it. What get's annoying though is if you for whatever reason ever need to factory reset your phone, you will have to go through various splash-screens and introduction pages in all the apps (Maps, Youtube, Photos, etc) again.
I'd say the nagging factor on Android (at least for the paid apps I use) are as close to zero you can get.
Compared to for instance Windows, it feels much better.
That said, some of their stuff does require an account even when you think it isn't warranted, such as reading arbitrary PDFs through their Play Books app (though the Drive PDF reader works fine regardless).
Apple Music fails becaus it's not magical like the iPod was versus the competition. It's a complicated player.
I believe Apple Music should be more like Google for music. A big search button and a recently played music easily accessible, also publicly playable widgets so you could share music on the web instead of resorting to YouTube.
My music library is huge, but I have no desire to listen to every single song on it. My shuffle pool is a hand-curated selection of some 500 tracks out of perhaps 10,000. I can recreate the pool when I have to but it's a phenomenal pain in the ass.
I used to do okay with the checked song feature in iTunes. But the checks are not respected by the software and there's no easy way to back them up and restore. After enough times syncing my phone to find songs that I'd unchecked magically got checked again, I switched to manual management.
I hate keeping state on my laptop but I've had to learn to put up with keeping it on my phone because Apple is just horrible at it. More than once I've lost all that state and had to recreate it. It's a skill I don't want to have to be good at.
Fucking Apple. If they can't figure this shit out, then one day I'm going to eat their lunch. It would not be hard at all to make a music app that's 10x better than their tripe.
I've spent years building a large and organized collection. I'm reluctant to switch to a streaming service because I'll lose the years of ratings, playlists, playcounts etc that I rely on, but at the same time both desktop and mobile software get worse all the time.
The UI is pretty utilitarian but everything seems to work.
I don't know why though... maybe it's just about keeping customers in the ecosystem? Most common reason I hear for getting an Apple product lately is "I have other things from Apple and they work together". Slightly ignoring the fact you're just burying yourself deeper in Apple dependencies rather than getting something that works with iOS/OSX and other systems.
Here's the spreadsheet to compare the services btw: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ptV0sWO2tBT4c3G8aiB0...
Yes you can? Just fire up iTunes and download it all, then copy it out of the iTunes folder.
WWDC last year provided a simple explaination explaining the whole Music shitshow -- remember the incoherent presentation?
Cook probably delegated the Music product to Dr Dre and Iovine, and they grafted their music insights and radio on top of Music.app, which was a mess to begin with. ...Or some similar organizational mess where lots of big egos weighed in hit and run style.
Remember, the PR push from Apple last year was all about how brilliant Ive, Dr Dre and Iovine were. There was a wired cover gushing about how they were "saving" music.
And the MacBook Pro comes up with DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. DVI/VGA are very much legacy connections. All their other MacBoosk come with DisplayPort. And given how well they are selling I would argue that nobody is really clamouring for more than 2 USB ports or additional connectors.
I have been a Spotify and Google Play Music subscriber before and I always found these very mechanical - you either know what to play, try to find some playlists or get some recommendation from an algorithm.
Beats 1 is very nice. The programs are more fun to listen to than some arbitrary playlists or music discovery. There is some talk and the music selection is much more interesting. Advantages over normal radio are that niches are better represented (I really liked Josh Homme's 'The Alligator Hour') and you can easily add interesting stuff to your library.
I have to say, a HomeKit-enabled table would be an interesting strategic play.
The file system, named, organized and managed by ME, remains the only thing I trust. You know what else is great about that? No foisting of album art.
Of course, when I am done editing, the photos live on my filesystem + encrypted backups :).
...still no correlation, though.