Apple’s history when it comes to social networks is not the brightest. The company launched the infamous Ping social networking tool back in 2010, only to shut it down two years later. This year, alongside the announcement of the highly anticipated Apple Music streaming service, the company launched Connect, a different take on a social network based entirely around music. Connect is much different from traditional social networks like Twitter and Facebook, though.
To unveil Connect, Apple brought out popular hip-hop artists Drake, who gave the service a ringing endorsement, as well as Trent Reznor. Drake touted that the service would provide a revolutionary way for artists to interact with their fans, but 8 months after the launch of Connect, it has yet to catch on with artists and listeners alike. Likewise, the feature hasn’t really received any updates or improvements from Apple in that time period either and there are certainly things that could be improved. Read on to find out some ways in which Apple Music could be enhanced…
Live streaming
This seems like something that should be incredibly obvious to Apple, given its tendency to live stream its Apple Music Festival (formally iTunes Music Festival) each year. If Apple could integrate Connect with live streams of popular interviews, concerts, and shows, it would give the everyday user more of a reason to use the service.
Look at Kanye West, for instance. Tomorrow, the popular rapper will premiere his new album The Life of Pablo (as of this post) and his new line of clothing during a special event at Madison Square Garden in New York City. West announced today, though, that he’s partnering with competing streaming music service Tidal to offer a live stream of the event, as well. If Tidal is able to secure deals like this, Apple can too.
To me, there isn’t any logical reason as to why Apple is working more diligently to offer live streams of concerts. The stream could be presented in the Connect tab of Apple Music, include exclusive behind-the-scenes content from artists and offer a live stream of the show. If Apple did something like this even once a month, you’d have to assume that use of Connect would skyrocket. Logistically, it’s challenging to live stream concerts, but getting more eyes and ears on Apple Music and Connect should be Apple’s end goal. And live streaming concerts from the world’s top artists would undoubtedly do that.
Better Integration with Beats 1 shows
One notable thing about Connect is that it doesn’t allow users to make full posts. It only allows them to comment on posts of artists and personalities. I like this. It prevents the service from becoming cluttered and useless, focusing on the music and content shared by artists instead. With that said, however, users could play a much bigger role in Beats 1 with the use of Connect.
Take Zane Lowe’s show, for instance. Every day he holds interviews with prominent musicians. Zane is certainly a great interviewer on his own, but fans would be much more inclined to tune-in if they had the ability to ask a question to the artist.
Apple Music hosts should make a post on Connect in which it encourages users to comment a question they have for whatever artist they might be interviewing. Then, during the interview, the Beats 1 host, whether it be Zane, Julie, Ebro, or whoever, should go and ask a few of the fan-submitted questions. Better integrating the fan into shows would be a huge way for Apple to grow Beats 1 and Connect at the same time.
Notifications
Somewhat building upon the first two ideas I suggested, Apple Music Connect should support the ability to receive notifications when someone you follow makes a post on the service. For instance, I should be able to go to Coldplay’s Connect page and turn on the ability to receive a push notification whenever they make a post to the service, whether it be an image, a song, lyrics, or something different.
Apple should allow users to enable the ability to receive a notification whenever a particular Beats 1 show starts. The notification could say what show was starting, who was going to be the guests, and take the listener directly to a Connect page on which they could listen to the stream and submit a question if an interview was going to take place.
Building upon that idea, Apple could take it to the next step and analyze the artists that a user follows and send them a notification when they are going to be guests on a particular Beats 1 show. For example, if I’m following G-Eazy on Connect and he’s going to be a guest on Zane Lowe’s show, I should receive a push notification informing me of that appearance so I can tune in and listen.
Improve the interface
I’m not a fan of the current user interface that Apple Music Connect offers. On the iPhone, it’s just a single stream of all your content sorted by how long ago it was posted. There’s no way to filter content by videos, images, or text posts. There’s also a somewhat obnoxious banner image for every single post, meaning that you have to scroll quite a bit to see multiple posts.
As to changes Apple should make to the Connect interface, I think they should put a heavier focus on comments and interaction between artists and fans. There’s no need for a generic banner image to be associated with every post on Connect. Instead, that space should be dedicated to showing a preview of the comments and making it more clear that users can in fact comment and interact with artists and that’s it’s not just a one-way communication platform.
On the Mac, there are loads of ways the Connect interface could be improved. In iTunes, you get essentially the same interface as you do on the iPhone, expect that it’s split into two columns. Connect does not do a good job at all of taking advantage of the added screen real-estate that a Mac offers compared to an iPhone.
More unique content
This kind of goes hand-in-hand with the idea of Apple offering live streams of events via Connect, but at the same time, there’s a lot more that can be done in terms of content. Right now, Connect is dominated by artists simply sharing the same content on it that they share on Twitter and Facebook. If Apple truly wants to create a music-centric social network, this can’t be the case.
Imagine a version of Connect where your favorite artists are sharing unique and exclusive content that they don’t share on Twitter and Facebook. Things such as behind-the-scenes pictures, snippets of unreleased songs, and much more. Apple has the pull to get artists to do this, but right now it seems like it is just not putting forth the effort.
Apple could also partner with artists to share exclusive content on Connect. The company already does this to a small degree, but there’s much more room for improvement. Offering daily or weekly exclusive content would give the average user an incentive to finally tap the Connect tab in Music.
To do this, Apple needs to offer better incentives to awards to get them to use Connect. Right now, artists are hesitant to adopt the platform because there’s just not a big enough audience using it to make it worth their while. Whether Apple decides to offer more prominent placement in Apple Music or iTunes, or more airtime on Beats 1, it needs to do something to incentivize the use of Apple Music Connect for artists.
Apple TV support
Apple Music Connect is nowhere to be found on the Apple TV, even on the newest fourth-generation model. While social networking has never been a huge success on televisions, Connect tends to offer a quality of content that’s higher than your average social network since it’s just artists sharing content, not every user.
On Apple TV, Connect would allow users to casually scroll through images and videos that have been shared on the service. Right now, users can’t view any Connect content unless they’ve saved it to their Apple Music library. Apple could also show Connect content when a user is listening to a certain artist or band, allowing the user to see what the artist has been sharing and encouraging them to user Connect on a more regular basis.
Improved commenting
Right now the comments on Apple Music Connect are a mess. They’re about as useful as Instagram comments. The comment system implemented with Connect really only works when you have individuals posting content, not popular artists that can draw in massive amounts of comments (although that’s currently not always the case on Connect, but it could be eventually).
Personally, I would love for a Reddit-style commenting system to be implemented. This would weed out the mediocre or spam comments and give users a chance to up vote/down vote based on the quality of the comment. While giving users the ability to reply to comments would get messy, I do think that Apple should allow for artists to be able to reply to comments. Doing this would open the door for Reddit-like “Ask Me Anything” posts from bands and artists on Connect, which would drive massive amounts of comments and interaction to the service.
Wrap up
If Apple doesn’t start to improve Connect and give users reasons to use it over other offerings like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat, the company could very well be looking down the barrel of another Ping situation. Right now, the reasons to use Connect are few and far between compared to other social networks.
The two biggest things Apple needs to do is improve fan interaction with artists on Connect, by implementing ideas like a better commenting system, and offer more unique content. If Apple were to offer exclusive live concert streams, Reddit-esque “Ask Me Anything” threads, and improve integration with Beats 1, users would have a variety of reasons to actually tap that “Connect” tab in their Music app. Right now, they don’t. And so far, Apple hasn’t given any indication that it is working towards improving the experience.
How often do you find yourself using Connect in its current state? Let us know in the poll below and elaborate on your choice in the comments!
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You can access some “Connect” content under “New” tab on Apple TV.
All of your suggestions are on point. I love the idea of a music-centric social network, but Connect could use a lot of work. It’s so much better than Ping, but we all know that’s not a very high bar.
The most baffling thing about Music Connect is that there are no notifications about new albums and tracks. I mean if I follow some artist, I’d be most excited to see a badge or push notification that they’ve dropped a new album. Instead I have to resort to use a custom RSS feed on a third party site.
Drop the timeline and separate “Connect”-tab, focus on Artist profile page -> think of it as IMDB or Wikipedia for artists and not a social network. And it needs to be dead-easy for a user to access the artists profile, today it requires too many clicks/taps.
I wonder why would people prefer Apple music over Spotify!
All my music is in iTunes and thus Apple Music makes more sense, everything in one place.
Interesting. I’ve gone the other way. I almost never start iTunes any more. For me iTunes is just slow awkward bloatware. I don’t even pay much attention to Beats and Connect and all of the other services Apple has hung onto iTunes like ornaments on a Christmas Tree. What’s the old saying about cleaning your own house first? Until Apple does a massive overhaul of iTunes the extra things they come up with are just not worth it.
It all depends if you’re a fan of exclusives. Apple is getting the timed exclusives. That’s simple.
I think there is another problem. It’s very hard for the artists to manage their profiles. Managing the profiles via web, OS X and iOS would be great.
Also a way to share content automatically on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and so on. Just one klick and boom: It’s there on all connected social networks. Also tools to share good content like songs, videos, pictures, lyrics, album covers, etc.. would also improve the quality of the content.
Connect is a waste of screen space to me. Not because it is executed badly, but because I use iTunes for a different reason and I think I am not alone.
Connect is trying to fight a war for music labels they have already lost because today, music is not about artists anymore, but music. From the beginning, Connect seemed little more than a way to get music labels on board.
I use iTunes in the first place to make playlists. iTunes’ unique capability is that I can combine streamed music with purchased music.
Secondly, I use it to find and categorize new music. For that, I use playlists. I search curated playlists and songs I like go into my own playlist.
It does not matter so much who the artist is, as it does in what playlist the music is.
Playlists playlists playlists. Let us share them, label them, combine them, play with them.
Apple should improve the experience of making and sharing playlists.
Apple Music could become the Pinterest of music or the Instagram of playlists.
The better Spotify, that also gives access to sold, but not streamed music.
Please phase out these whole stupid, ancient, monolithic Radio and Connect things.
You’re right but ..
There are also people out there who really love music and the (life)style of an artist. It’s really cool to listen to a spontaneous live session or maybe how somebody is singing under the shower or in the garden or listening to demos of songs, wich will we never see the public and so on. Connect is good to promote new songs, new albums, new artists, but it’s also something like “Behind the scenes” …
I belive there are people out there, they’re using stuff / content like this as an inspiration.
And if somebody don’t like this content, they can turn it off.
Sorry for my bad english, but I hope you will understand my message.
To add something: I’m using AppleMusic or iTunes in the same way as you do. :)
Agreed, in reality it should have a separate application for integration rather cluttering the music app more… it’s bad enough the music app is organized the way it is now cramming in a crazy amount of features :(.
That face you make when 9to5 says someone needs to improve commenting system
I just wish there were some way I could quickly access my favorite artists, since 90% of the time I go for what I know and like. Sure I could create a playlist of every song ever created by each artist I like, but that’s cumbersome and doesn’t auto update if any new songs are released. Just allow me to add favorite artists and for me to quickly browse their albums / songs.
Good ideas. Many would hate this but I think Connect should be a stand-alone app. It’s more Social than Music IMO. Would be much easier for notifications and less confusing for users.
This is how I feel, although I think it’s something that will happen once the fabled video streaming app goes live. It should be something baked into all of the media/store applications. Directors, actors, musicians, even developers all able to post items, allow for commenting, and reach out to fans. Most of the proposed changes make sense with that change though. It should still do all of the things outlined above but with more content providers.
All good ideas. Additional comments… Apple should have automatic post capabilities for certain artist updates such as:
1) Notification/calendar/purchase system for concert tickets
2) New single / album / video released to Apple Music by the artist should show up in Connect, allowing me to play it or add it to library right there
Also, my biggest problem is that artists use these third part links to track referrals and sometimes it kicks you out of the app to safari only to bring you right back to Music.app or sometimes the artist is purposefully linking you to YouTube so they can get the views/ad revenue there. I think they should ban outside links.
I wish Apple would notify users when an artist you follow has a new release. I don’t know how this doesn’t exist. I shouldn’t have to manually check every time.
Because everyone from labels to promoters to tech companies expects us to place that entire responsibility on top of our plate of everything else.
Way behind Spotify…
Add a notification system.
Add a notification system.
Add a notification system.
Umm maybe curated smart playlists for people who workout and add songs somehow linked to heart rate and workouts.
I wish there was a way to search for past posts from artists and search connect by itself to look at what people have said.