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Comment by mkj | Hacker News Reader

Apple seem to be trying to push app store like restrictions to the whole music industry. How many classic album covers would violate these rules?

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A lot. A whole host of covers probably violates the arbitrary 'no pornography' guidelines (even omitting the obvious examples like The Scorpions' Virgin Killer). Then again, this is just a set of criteria for Apple Music. Artists can always just generate a gradient just for Apple Music like that pretentious Baby Keem example — the paragraph below those covers about sparking conversation; that has to be some form of sarcasm I'm not getting right?

> No barcodes

Well, too bad for the Barcode Brothers:

https://www.discogs.com/release/224392-Barcode-Brothers-Flut...

since all their records are in Apple Music, I think the barcode restriction is not "any object that resembles a barcode" but actual product barcodes. At least one hopes.

Once companies get big enough their polices can be industry shaping, before Apple it was Walmart

"On other CD's he has bought at Wal-Mart, record companies had removed songs or altered artwork on the covers to make them acceptable to the discount chain, although Adam said he was not aware of it.

Adam's mother, Arlene, said she did not like Wal-Mart's policy. ''It should be my decision instead of theirs,'' she said."

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/12/arts/wal-mart-s-cd-standa...

The difference from 1996, is that now Arlene can simply go to the artists’ website and buy the content directly with zero extra friction and bypass all of Walmart’s (or Apple’s) meddling.

"Industry-shaping" doesn't seem so bad. "Art-shaping" provokes other feelings. Counterculture's lost its soul in the past decade. It's time to rekindle it.

Have you actually looked at the rules? Which one do you find objectionable?

I red the article with the idea that I am going to snap at Apple for starting with "Express yourself" and then placing a bunch of restrictions, but then I red the restrictions and I can't find anything that I could object to. Even when they say "No blurry, pixelated, tilted, or cropped images" they clarify "unless intended".

There is infinite freedom within the rules. There is no need for you to spam my phone screen with additional hashtags, handles or copies of information that I already have on my screen.

"Only include relevant information such as artist name, release title as text, and the exact song title or album as released" seems to imply no other text is allowed.

"No dates" - would Pulp Disco 2000 be allowed? Who knows?

Maybe their machine learning was all getting confused.

edit: I will add - I really couldn't care if it were just Apple blocking some music from their store - appleid is too much of a hassle anyway! But it'll drag the whole music industry into having to work with the lowest common denominator bland cover art.

That would seem to rule out a very high percentage of the music I listen to, which frequently has abstract or fully image-processed content on the cover. I have a feeling I know what they're trying to avoid in their catalogs, and that's looking like a crate of records in a dusty music shop. They are merchandising the hits, not trying to even make it feasible to find the market-losers later.

How do their rules exclude abstract images? If this is the one you're referring to:

> No blurry, pixelated, tilted, or cropped images unless intended.

Notice the 'unless intended.' I imagine they're trying to avoid hastily or poorly uploaded artwork.

> hastily or poorly uploaded

I would say that is often a good description of the artistic intent.

I wonder if Viper is on Apple Music

Assuming you mean the artist with albums titled "Trap Lord 2" and "Life Is Fair 4 Me II", yes, they are.

thanks for this subthread =)

Isn't it the same as a physical store refusing to stock your album because of something objectionable to them on the cover?

Yes but they seem to have some pretty draconian rules where a beautiful looking music catalogue (for users and Apple’s marketing screenshots) is more important than the artistic nature of whatever album art the musician might want.

Who are Apple to say I can’t put another artists photo on my album?

Sounds to me like it’s primed for some artist(s) to break as many rules as possible with a legitimate release to see how Apple actually respond.

> Who are Apple to say I can’t put another artists photo on my album?

Are you not able to purchase music and import to the Music app with whatever metadata you want?

I am not posing a rhetorical question, I do not have experience with the Music app outside of using the Apple Music subscription service so I would like to know if they do restrict these kinds of things.

I'm not OP, but yes it is possible to import arbitrary music into the Apple Music app with whatever cover art and other metadata you want. It's as easy as dragging in a folder of normal, tagged FLAC or MP3 files and it will use the metadata in them to group into albums etc.

It's also user-configurable whether the app will move your files into its folder and organization scheme or just leave them alone where you put them.

Then I am not seeing the problem.

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