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Comment by craze3 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, us Apple Music users have been waiting for this forever! For anyone who's curious about how this product developed:

- April 2016: Apple releases Apple Music API

- December 2018: A third-party Apple Music web player is launched on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/playapplemusic-com (Created by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shivdhar)

- January 2019: Another third-party alternative, Musish, launches on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18940407

- Now: Apple finally launches their own official player!

Makes sense with Spotify being so popular on web...

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I'm not where it fits into the timeline, but Apple has actually offered a rather obscure and limited way to use Apple Music in a browser for some time prior to the launch of the full web client.

There's no way to browse, or even launch it directly. You have to search, via Google or other, for an album, and follow the link to what always used to be the iTunes Preview page. You can still listen to the thirty-second previews on this page, but there's a sign-in link in the header that will, quite surprisingly, unlock full playback of the album without launching iTunes.

It's hardly the full Apple Music experience – all you get is the album you found and some related links at the bottom, with no access to your library or playlists – but it does work. I'm not really sure what purpose this functionality served, other than perhaps as a testbed for the actual web client, but it's still active for the time being.

This is used for sites such as Genius (lyrics aggregator/social commentary mix, still uses Apple Music I believe) to provide a snippet to browsers without a subscription.

Hmmm. This ignores Apple acquiring Lala.com in '09.

I used to love LaLa. I was so annoyed when Apple killed it. Google Music eventually replaced it for me, but LaLa was truly ahead of its time

Spotify has had it since 2008 and Google Play Music since 2011. Blows my mind that people have used this for so long without web support... Then again if you're stuck in the garden, you don't have much choice.

Funnily enough, Macs do let you listen to music from your web browser, and don't force you to use iTunes.

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