I’m not expecting here to replicate my rather extensive Apple Watch diary series – I doubt this one will run to four pieces. I’m also not starting out here as an Apple Music skeptic. I’ve been using Spotify for years, and – from a brief trial of Beats Music – started out pretty confident I would be jumping ship once Apple Music launched.
But I do think Apple Music has one thing in common with the Watch: I don’t think it’s possible to judge it without a reasonable amount of usage. So I thought I’d begin with my first impressions and then follow up once I’ve used it long enough to have more to say.
I’m not going to dwell on the launch-day glitches, like the welcome screen (above) left over from the beta, the rather belated iTunes update, Beats 1 outage, frequent spinning beachballs in iTunes and the tracks that either refused to play at all or took an age to do so. Half the planet was simultaneously using the service yesterday, so these things will only become issues if they persist. So leaving those aside, what were my first impressions … ?
Signing-up
Signing-up to Apple Music in the iOS app was entirely painless. Having trialled Beats Music, the opening interface was familiar, and it’s one I think works well. Tap the bubbles you like, double-tap the ones you love, tap-and-hold to ‘burst’ the ones you dislike.
After selecting my genres, I did four rounds of artist selection and de-selection. That done, I eagerly tapped on For You. In my view, this is – or should be – the heart of Apple Music. Personalized recommendations for me based not just on algorithms, but on personal selections made by people with a deep knowledge of the music industry. That’s the Apple Music promise.
The first playlist it offered me was Evening Commute: Acoustic, and I was instantly impressed. It was heavy on my favorite genre – singer-songwriter – but also mixed in pop and alternative. Of the 16 tracks it offered, I skipped only two – and those because I found them so-so rather than actively disliking them. That’s a far better hit-rate than any Spotify playlist I’ve tried.
The second thing that impressed me was, of those 16 tracks, I only owned two of them. That has always been the main weakness to me of Spotify’s playlists: they tend to play a lot of music I already own. Artist radio, in particular, is very heavily biased toward the artist themselves, rather than other artists you might like. Sometimes, Spotify had just felt like a slightly lazier way to listen to my own music. Apple Music, in contrast, was doing what I see as the core job of a streaming music service: introducing me to new music.
From those 16 tracks, I liked two of them enough to add them to My Music. Apple Music was off to a great start.
Yes, I do have dodgy musical tastes, let’s move along …
Unfortunately, things went fairly rapidly downhill from there. It initially offered me only one other playlist, and that one was far less successful. Nothing I actually hated, but nothing I loved or even particularly liked. It was really nothing more than inoffensive background listening. A third playlist popped up later, and that one I mostly disliked.
In addition to the three playlists, it initially offered me six albums. I already owned three of them. It later expanded these to twelve albums; I owned nine of them. Nine out of twelve. Nine albums sitting in my iTunes library. Where’s the supposed integration between my music library and the streaming service? Why is a music discovery service showing me music I discovered for myself years ago?
Now, I guess you could argue that it would be legitimate to surface albums I owned but haven’t played for ages, but nope: two were albums I play often. Again, iTunes has access to play counts, so this is hardly the seamless marriage of owned and streamed music I’d hoped for. The only good news here is the other three albums were ones I don’t yet own by artists I have in my library; that’s legitimate and useful.
By the following morning, Apple Music was offering me three Intro To selections. Intro To is a great concept: show me an artist I don’t know, and give me a hand-curated selections representing a good cross-section of tracks by that artist. Fantastic. Except … all three artists it was ‘introducing’ to me were, yep, you guessed it: artists already in my music library!
Now, I know this is day 2. It needs to learn my tastes. But the whole point of integrating owned and non-owned music into a single app is, surely, to use one to generate suggestions for the other? Offering me albums I already own is silly, and Intro To artists I already own is absolutely crazy.
The user interface in both apps is, I would say, a little clunky. In the iOS app, if you really love a track, the chances are you’re going to want to do three things:
- tell Apple Music you like it, so it learns
- make it available offline to listen to it more in the immediate future
- add it to My Music to effectively make it part of your music library
Those are three separate actions in the app (only two of which can be done from the Now Playing screen, as far as I can see). Now, I’m hoping/assuming the app is smart enough to realize that if you make it available offline or add it to My Music, that’s because you like it – and that either action is treated as a Like – but even if I’m right, it’s still two actions.
The iTunes ‘…’ menu gives you the choice of New Station from Artist and New Station from Song; the iOS app just gives you Start Station. Again, it doesn’t give much of an integrated feel. And the menus also order things differently. On the iOS app, Start Station is above Add to My Music; in iTunes, the order is reversed. A small point, but Apple is all about attention to detail, and it’s lacking here.
There’s also no obvious way for me to tell Apple Music that I dislike a track. With Beats, you could give a thumbs-down as well as a thumbs-up. Apple/Beats clearly recognizes from the setup stage that what we dislike is as important as what we like, but once past setup I can see no way in either app to give a thumbs-down to a track – there’s only a heart option to like it.
The latter point seems to me more than a UI complaint: it would also reduce the effectiveness of Apple Music’s ability to learn my tastes.
Here’s where I’m going to sound like my dad. I’m not a fan of DJs as a concept; I just want the music. By all means hire DJs to create the playlists, but I won’t want them talking between tracks – and talking over tracks ought to be a felony.
My musical tastes are far from cool, so I sampled Beats 1 without expecting much, and I wasn’t disappointed. This isn’t a criticism: I’m just not the target market.
Conclusions so far
I have to confess, I’m disappointed. From my brief trial of Beats, I’d been expecting great things of Apple Music – and so far it hasn’t delivered. The UI stuff isn’t a big deal, it just feels messy; not learning from the music I already own is the big disappointment.
But I do fully acknowledge that it’s unfair to judge the service on day two: I need to give it a decent shot at learning my tastes, so I’m going to religiously Like every track it plays that I do like, and see how it does over the next week or three. Watch this space.
What are your own first impressions? Take our poll, and let us know your views in the comments.
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What is the reason you can’t use airplay when listening to Beats One via iTunes?
I don’t know, that is strange.
Yeah, that’s annoying. Good thing there is Airfoil!
Option-Click the volume icon in the top corner,
The “Share Song” option is EMBARRASSING! It’s just posts a horribly pixelated pic of the album art with a link and no other info… no song/album title, no artist name.
I had to write in everything else… besides the link, but this is what it looks like: https://twitter.com/Nardes/status/615978690783129600
Great Story Ben, Thanks! When will we get a picture of you without your hand in front of your face?
I don’t think ever. Somehow he writes in a way that never result in a facepalm¡
Heh, I thought I’d updated that a while back, but apparently not. Will do it tomorrow …
Can someone please help me.. Apple music is taking up to much memory on my iPhone, every time I add a song to my playlist it’s like I’m downloading it to my phone, with spotify I’m able to have 800 songs on my playlist and it doesn’t take up to much memory… I’m I doing something wrong?
Definitely some bug or something. Ive noticed that when I play a track and add it to my music, even though I dont choose offline it seems like it gets added to my song total under settings. If this is the case then its a problem. Cause in time its gonna take up a lot of space.
Go to settings – Music – activate “iCloud Music Library”, you can activate if you want to use 3G or only wi-fi
1) That’s an excellent article. Not just because I agree with your sentiment, and points, but you explain the why part. Many times journalists fail to elaborate on that.
2) I’ve only listened to their radio station, so I cannot comment the ‘matching part’ of their algorithm. Or lack therefor, so it seems.
3) What was Ida Marie doing in your screen dump¿
3) Liked this one: “Here’s where I’m going to sound like my dad”
4) Yes, I will be watching this space, though I already am.
I’m the opposite – I haven’t listened to any of the radio stations beyond Beats 1, but will be doing this.
Similar experiences here, both via iOS and the Desktop iTunes which I’ve been using more. A good way to check what music I like would be to scan what songs are already in my library plus how often they’re played. With the initial bubble on iOS I was unable to do very much because the UI is somewhat broken on a 3.5″ screen – I attribute this to zero testing. Double tapping a bubble makes it too big to move around which makes it impossible to click on off-screen bubbles. It’s an infuriating and cumbersome UI that should be replaced with a LIST as soon as possible. There should also be an option to revisit this UI to tune it up.
While you can specify two levels of “like” during the initial discovery, later on you can only “heart/love” a track (not an artist) which seems a little ill-thought for the same purpose. There’s also no way later to say “this sucks, I hate it” to anything. A music preference system needs to support a “loathe” feature or it will always be incomplete – negatives are just as important as positives. I used a people-powered system back in the very early 90’s, before the web, called ROMEO, which was pretty damned cool.
When floating music I already have, at the very least, don’t promote the ability to download to my library when it already exists there.
Another huge complaint, but about iTunes in general is that the presentation of artists doesn’t seem to use a unique artist ID, such that you will often (always) have multiple artists with the same name polluting each other’s artist pages. This is really inexcusable.
I was elated in the first few hours, now my playlists and artists are messed with duplicates, the meta data is so totally screwed that I may revert to a backup and try Apple Music in a couple of month’s time
I do like the layout. I hate a can not simply gather some song into a playlist for the gym for example and then enjoy it on my ipad with my beat solo 2 wireless… With spotify I can arrange some songs I like on my mac book, then I am pretty confident I get somewhere open my ipad and run the app, those song added will be updated… the icloud thing on the music playlist sharing is the problem…
Why not? You can. Just make sure iCloud Music Library is enabled in settings. That will keep your playlists in sync.
So I turned iCloud Music Library manually on iTunes on the desktop and it fails after the scan and during a genius faze. Next.
On iPhone you can turn it on manually or it will turn on automatically when you add music to “My Music” from the cloud or “Make Available Offline” – which seems like the exact same thing.
After doing this on the iPhone I was able to pull an entire album onto the phone for offline play, BUT, here’s the kicker, it deleted about 1/4 of all the music on my iPhone without the ability to get it back. The songs aren’t listed under their albums on the phone. On iTunes they show up as greyed out.
Trying to copy music manually to the iPhone after enabling iCloud Music Library doesn’t work – it always pops up pan error that “some” of the music can’t be copied because iCloud is enabled. Synching the phone doesn’t put the disabled tracks back.
Turning off iCloud Music Library and then disconnecting and reconnecting the phone allows a sync which promptly restored all the missing tracks by copying them from my library.
This feature is a non-starter.
Something Funny:
After attempting every advice to check on preferences.
I decided to download the pc version of Itunes at work (we use windows at work).
Surprisingly, Itunes pc version works perfectly after enabling icloud, I can elaborate playlist and enjoy them on my IOS devices. Mac Book Pro is still down…
This is Day 2 with apple music…
The whole thing is very messy. in iTunes I can’t add track from Apple Music to playlist without adding it first to My Music. WHen I try to edit playlist, everything but My Music is greyed out. So odd. Overall doing things seems very different between iOS and Mac. Spotify had this working very well.
Syncing playlists between devices (iCloud Music Library) takes LONG time. I also don’t get why is it disabled by default.
I love the playlists thought, they’re really good and often spot-on. But I feel there’s a lot of work to experience of this service.
That sure is a bug, because I can add track to my playlist without adding it to my music… but i need to search for the track and then add to my playlist, if im in the playlist it wont let me….
I forgot to add, in the “For You” tab, on average, 9 out of 10 recommended artists or albums already exist in my Library – sometimes 100% overlap. And this is via iTunes, so the app can definitely access all my music – it simply doesn’t factor your library whatsoever.
I also can’t find any way to listen to anything I don’t already have OFFLINE without turning on iCloud Music – which by all account will really screw things up in my library if other reports are accurate.
Not sure if this answers your question or not but if you touch on the word “Artists” in the my music tab it being up a way to sort them to show only offline music.
I didn’t have any music on my phone before (it was all through Spotify) so I’m not sure if it shows offline without iCloud library enabled.
Putting local and streamed music into a single app and then not factoring in the local music is a massive fail if what we’re both experiencing is design rather than launch glitch.
Is a ‘felony’ a ‘crime’?
More specifically, a serious one.
With regards to the “Intro to…” comment, it’s a fair point, though not all the music I have in my library I am particularly familiar with, so a formal introduction can help – though really there should be the option for this on the artist page (similar to the radio function).
My view of the For You tab including owned music is that it is suggesting albums that you like or will like, not necessarily that you don’t own. Admittedly this is confusing though, as it means that section of Apple Music is not exclusively for music discovery.
All-in-all, from my first day’s experience with Apple Music, I’ve gotta say I’m impressed by the integration with my music and the interface is far speedier and effective than Spotify’s and even Deezer’s. Julie Adenuga’s show this morning was a pleasure to listen to, also. A MAJOR boon is the ability to easily add and remove songs, artists and albums from the up next queue – this is something I have felt to be lacking in every streaming service I have used.
Minor niggles are: bugs which cause dodgy search results and app crashes, and a drawn-out process for building playlists from the service’s expanded library. Also, there are many tracks not present which are present on Spotify.
I’m putting the niggles down to the fact the service is a day old, and am hopeful for the future. What I know is that I have cancelled Spotify.
Also, Apple have somehow managed to make iTunes even more bloated and even more confusing. When will the torture end?
I voted OK. Nothing to hashtag about, yet, but my two issues are:
1. I added a few tracks to My Music seamlessly. Those tracks even appeared for me on my iPhone 6 running the iOS 9 beta (I am using our old iPhone 4S as an iPod these days, and is where I subscribed to Apple Music). Thought this was great. This may be a benefit/side-effect of being an iTunes Match subscriber, so can’t comment there. Then I went into iTunes on my Macs. Updated to 12.2. Grey squares with text data and greyed out songs that were not playable. No artwork. Even this morning, same thing. So I just deleted them for now.
—- Related note. I didn’t realize I had a couple albums. Some of the U2 earlier albums that they reissued as Deluxe about 2008. So I added them. Then I looked in My Music and I had one album, with each song twice. These were iTunes purchases, so I feel your pain/concern there.
2. Family Sharing/Children Accounts. This was what I was most excited about. I had both my girls logged in as me prior to 8.4 so they could use our songs in iTunes Match. I changed this yesterday after the updates. All good. Set them up in Apple Music, created there own accounts (using the Family Sharing Apple IDs I created for them last year). All works fine. They can find a song or album and play it, no issues. They can make tracks available offline, again, no issue. But when they just want to tap “Add to My Music” – they can, they get the animated checkmark overlay. But the songs never go over to the “My Music” section. I hope this bug gets fixed.
Overall, the service is good. The price is right for my two girls, and I get the benefit, too. I am planning to stay subscribed at this point, but won’t cancel iTunes Match just yet, but will likely not renew it come October…
When I play a song on my iPhone with my Apple Watch on there is the heart icon. With the Watch being quick interactions—e.g. driving—it annoys me that when you click the heart it brings up 3 choices: like it, add it to my music, dislike it. Plus I would have never thought that clicking the heart would let me dislike it. But when you brought up the lack of a dislike button I realized that there totally isn’t one outside the Watch. Strange. I would like the heart on the watch to just heart it and let me move on with my day; if I want I’ll add it to my music later.
Just tried that – you’re right, that’s completely the wrong way around, offering more choice on the Watch than the phone. I tried long-pressing the heart on the phone just in case I’d missed a feature, but nothing.
Put me in the “ok” vote camp. As of right now I prefer Spotifys app by a lot and factor in Spotify will still work nicely on a free tier when I want a break from paying and I have no reason to switch.
It’s okay. Not as good as Spotify – it’s a messy, buggy app. Connect is a disaster with no actual social features, it’s not integrated into your existing library at all it seems and honestly, these human-made stations simply aren’t very good and are certainly worse than an algorithm in my experience.
Definitely won’t be switching.
I have been acquiring albums on vinyl and CD for 35 years. My current iTunes library would be over 35,000 if I included it all. As it is is almost 29,000 items so Music is pretty much useless to me if I want to use it like Spotify as I can’t turn on Music Match thing till the limit is raised from 25,000 items. Those with big pre existing libraries are locked out – I do not want to have to ‘prune’ 4,000 tunes from my music library. Doh.
My irritation goes as follows…
“Hey Siri, play Burn by Ellie Goulding”
“OK, let’s hear some Ellie Goulding”
…Spice Girls starts playing… WTF!!
Is anyone else having issues with saving music for offline playback? I’ve tried adding both individual tracks and entire albums for offline playback (as well as adding them to “My Music”), but when I search “My Music”, the tracks do not appear. Am I missing something?
Yes I am too. And a lot of people I’ve spoken to are also having trouble. The offline playback feature is ridiculously buggy. Sometimes albums download, sometimes they don’t. There is no rhyme nor reason to it. Sometimes, if you to to download six or seven times it will work, sometimes it never works. Sometimes, after restarting your phone, songs that you tried to download hours earlier will suddenly start downloading. Other times they won’t.
Aside from this the whole thing is a mess: there’s simply no need for the Connect tab, the For You and New tabs essentially do the same thing. In fact the only way of playing music is searching for it.
I want to be able to launch Music, tap to find an artist, tap to find a song, tap to play it. No more than three taps. In its current form the interface is like swimming in treacle.
Really surprised that as little that I used it I found so many issues. Blank response boxes that are obviously bugs and go take a look at the picture for Billy idol……um that’s Billy Joel really apple I expect a lot better.
To me the best thing about Apple Music is the seamless integration with my iTunes library. As a old-fashioned music fanatic, I have a huge library filled with CD-rips or even high resolution music files, and have never ever used any music streaming services before (tried Tidal and Spotify for only a month or two). Any streaming services before Apple Music to me were mere unnecessary addition to my music library, and I would solely use them to audit a new album before I find it good and buy the CD from Amazon. Apple Music has made the line between my personal music foundation and the ocean of music out there on the cloud very very vague, and that alone ensures that I like it and would (still) not consider any other streaming services. This is the first streaming service that feels right for someone such as myself.
But The streaming songs don’t integrate at all with your local library unless you turn on iCloud Music Library. *and* if you do that, you can no longer copy local tracks to an iOS device – at least not by dragging and dropping.
So do you only use iTunes on your Mac? The only reason I use iTunes is to fix tag data and manage my iOS devices. My music library is primarily played via Slim (Logitech) Music Server.
Hold a album or a playlist in FOR YOU and you have the option to say ”Recomment Fewer Like This”. I think that act as the DISLIKE button you couldn’t find
Ah, interesting. That isn’t there at a track level, but works for both albums and playlists – thanks!
Wish the desktop interface had this feature. It seems that adding right-click options on the desktop version could mimic the press and held gestures on our iOS devices.
Hi. I didn´t like the UI. It doesn´t have option to swipe left and right to change track. Information of hour and battery show up over the album picture, what is very strange to me. I prefer the player of spotify. Besides, after close de app, my iphone 6 stay slow for 3 seconds. After this time, it works normaly.
You can tell Apple Music if you don’t like certain things…. Well, you can press and hold on a playlist in “For you’ and you get the option to “recommend less like this’ and therefore it learns you want to see less of that person or style of music.
Thank you, a great article that sums up most of my experience with AM so far. I am discovering some new music, so that’s good. My biggest problem at the moment in the discovery process is the incredibly clumsy way of diving deeper in to an artist/album from a radio stream.
Example: I’m listening to a House radio station, I hear a song I like. All I can do is add it to my music, I can’t go directly to the album an start listening to all the other songs. Well, I can, but on the iTunes store. And that doesn’t allow me to add the music to my library, only purchase, so it’s pointless. So the process continues like this – I add the track to my music, then click on it in my music to start playback, at that point I can go to the full album, show all the other tracks and listen to them. But even there the problems continue – the moment I add a track that I like from that album iTunes stops the playback. So I have to restart it. It shouldn’t be happening. Also I’ve noticed that if I heart the song before I add it iTunes/AM looses the heart once I add it to my music, so I have to heart it again (or only after adding it). Not what I was expecting. I really hope Apple iron out these issues.
Yes, the whole thing seems to lack the one thing I was most expecting: an integrated experience.
It’s a completely unfocused offering. In apparent effort to throw in everything and the kitchen sink they have flooded the kitchen.
“. . . and talking over tracks ought to be a felony.”
THAT.
As a musician/composer myself I like to listen to how the song evolves from the opening material. There’s a DJ talking over the material. An effective piece often ends as it begins, there’s a DJ talking over the material. And throughout the piece the introductory material should be developed, there’s a DJ talking over the material in the middle.
So I guess this is good, theme and variation on the beginning of the piece, developing the F’ing DJ. I just don’t think that’s what the artist intended.
If only there was ample time for the DJ to talk between the music selections; oh wait, there is.
After reading this article and some of the comments that follow it. I’m glad Apple Music is still not available in my part of the world yet. Hopefully when it is many of the bugs and UI messiness will have been resolved.
And Apple had better fix them – quickly! If they don’t, after the the trial period is over, people are going to start leaving in droves, with the service ending up like Ping. After all there are long established better services available. I’m not trying to put Apple down because I really wanted this new service to be the best out there, the hype was promising, but the results don’t live up to it.
I’m not completely sure, but when it comes to the Apple services that Eddy Cue is responsible for – this, iCloud etc…they always seems to be a hot mess! This guy I don’t think is good for Apple.
No Handoff/Continuity is the deal beaker for me, when working often have Spotify playing through my Mac and change tracks etc through my iPhone or iPad if i go for a wander, of course can use Apple Remote but its not as fully featured or slick as Spotify Connect.
Syncing is just terrible and I often have try 3 times to move a track into a playlist, first couple of tries clicking on the add to playlist option nothing shows.
It’s just currently very very buggy. I will wait a few months before cancelling my Spotify subs. Really want it to succeed but looks like they’ve tried to pack in too many features and not finished any of them properly. Always has been a problem with iTunes especially iTunes cloud services like iTunes Match.
Oh and they’ve removed BBC Radio 6 Music…pretty much the only thing i have used iTunes for in the last couple of years. Can understand why and plenty of work arounds, but still…
Dont work as expect with the apple Tv,
I’m confused on the itunes integration for the music I own. It seems to only show the music that is stored on my device. I live in an area with no shortage and no limit on data connections. I don’t want to store anything on my device and I figured the whole point of a streaming service is to STREAM.
So my question is why does the music I own not show up in “my music”? Do I really have to download my tracks in order to play them or worse yet look them all up manually and add them to a streaming playlist?
if the tracks are purchased from itunes, then you should be able to play them from the cloud… i think you need to be signed into you apple ID and allow cloud sharing with music
It’s unfair to judge and compare to Spotify….Spotify’s been out for while, we have to wait a little longer in order to truly have something to compare.
I’m indifferent towards Beats 1, but Apple Music in general is great for me. I’m loving the radio stations, which is iTunes Radio essentially. I get plenty of Techno, Tech House, Deep House, and I can save these tracks to my iPhone, so I’m a happy camper.
Strangely i am not a huge fan of music… i thought this would be a great way to change that… i seriously hate it when people are like “what?!? no music?!?…you know what that means?…no music, no life!”
Ok…so i do listen to some music… but i’m very very picky — so i’m not one to spend money on a whole album just because of an artist — ive done this one or twice and thats because i liked enough of the songs and it worked out a better deal to buy the whole album than just the songs… but usually i will just buy a single song from random artist and hate much of the other stuff they sing…
I certainly hate ‘love’ songs that are from young people with little experience, or songs that try to be more than what they are, or music that is just random noise to me…lol
So i was hoping this music service would hopefully find me stuff i’d like…stuff i probably wouldnt listen to… instead i think it was totally baffled and thought “we’ll try him with stuff most people like” — sorry, but no Michael Jackson for me :-( … all the random noises, nasal singing, etc just distracts me — although some of his videos are good…lol
Needless to say i was certainly not impressed when it tried getting me to listen to ‘experimental music’ — someone attempting to ‘sing’ by making random noises to the sound track of machinery and traffic is noise — i might as well go sit by the road…
It’s still early days… 3 months are free — so i will keep trying and hoping find something i like…lol…but i may be a challenge for Apple Music… :-P
I can’t find any way to make a custom playlist with streamed tracks on iTunes on the desktop without turning on iCloud Music and first copying the tracks to “My Music” – which is a non-starter because it means my local music can’t be copied to iOS any longer.
And that’s a manual process. I can’t find a way to make an algorithmic/smart playlist from streamed content either. Like play only Indie tracks from 1997 for instance.
where is the smart list feature for the Music app, has that disappeared?
Coming from Beats Music, I agree with alot of this article… Beats 1 is kind of interesting, even as someone who is probably being targeted by the service… I love how eclectic the music is, especially Julie Adenuga’s show, but I’m a lot less impressed with Ebro’s show (and I listened to his show on HOT 97 often).
I am learning that Apple software equals disappointment. Most of us here are in love with Apple, but it’s because of their hardware. We give Apple a huge trust credit and we believe next updates will be great, but they never are. I don’t know how it happens that $B+ company can’t do good software anymore. Every single Apple’s app is f***** up in some way, especially the core ones, like awful AppStore, buggy Mail and the winner of this category… Game Center, which is synonym of a bug. I will stick to Spotify, because I predict Apple Music will be only a problem and constant waiting for the better.
what i don’t understand at “Beats 1 radio”: why can’t i view a song in iTunes?
– or create a playlist…(error appears instead)
do i have to sign in for the music service for that?
– if so, would be great without signing in…
: just listen to the radio, and ad a song to “whishlist” or view in iTunes, …
Does anyone know how i can write a suggestion to apple about this service ?
I live in France, but love Country Music, and they just decided to not show this genre of music in the french app… Therefore, the app is useless for me, as I have to manually look for artists I like, but no radio or anything… Spotify is, imho, much much better in playlists, but I’d like to give apple a chance :)
I dont know. Ive been trying it for some days now. Think its a decent service. But I think im gonna go back to Spotify.
I put “good but not great”.
Good because the dance radio station made me listen to interesting thing I never heard of (although it started with a song I had already in my iTunes Library and did not recognise I had it already). And beats 1 makes you listen things that you cannot really get here in Germany on a regular radio – only pop or 80s or rock or classic here… it’s difficult to know what is really trendy in house/dance/electronic if not very commercial. I did not manage to find a way to like what you are listening and save it for later (either buy/stream/locally store).
That said, the heart “like” option is easy, but you cannot search afterwards what you have liked, and if you liked it, it is not immediately added to My Music and shown separately (I might want to buy the song maybe???).
You cannot dislike.
It is confusing to know what is on your hard drive and your property, and what is temporarily streamed or locally stored/cached on your drive.
The iCloud syncing to my iPhone doesn’t really work, as it takes FOREVER to sync from the cloud (on 120Mbit Wifi connection or 40Mbit LTE). Essentially I had to give up and I left for the time being on my iPhone 6 music I sync as usual from my iTunes Library.
The “for you” section is a good idea, but providing a full set of one single dance artist, not really what I was looking for, or albums that I already have on my iTunes library.
So, good idea, and as I read in another post, another example of half baked software that you ask yourself if it was ever been tested before release. The above are things I discovered in the first 10 mins of usage, not days.
Let’s hope it will not take months to clean it up – they have the money, deliver excellent hardware, they need to step up the game on software, fast.
PS: it is a worldwide service right? why then in the genre initial selection I only see german specific genres (with also the usual “pop” “rock” etc), and I cannot choose genres from other countries too?
PS2: stream here and there? not really with the contracts/pre-paid data “flats” you get at least in Germany. 3GB is what I have, if I start streaming music, I am at GPRS speeds in 2 days. Wifi anyone?? :D
Add to my Library means it is added but it is on the cloud not taking space from your device (will use data to access it will skip them when you don’t have cellphone data active) Make available offline will add to your icloud library (for further access) and download the file to your device.
In my opinion it recommends artists you own because it knows you love them, so why would it ignore them after all it makes a lot of sense to listen to the music you already own. But I think Apples final goal is ” to convince” us to listen to new artists, one we haven’t ever heard of to make a bigger profit in the long run. Not just listen to Cash Cow Taylor Swift. I think the idea is good but how much are we willing to listen to “the hootnannys” instead of” the offspring” to give an example?
Does anyone know why when I add albums to “My Music” they are greyed out and not available to play?
I added a few last night on my MAC at home, im trying to listen to them on my Windows desktop at work and they will not play. I just added another album and only some of the tracks are available
you need to go to settings and activate songs without Wi-Fi, or check the album to offline
I don’t see this in settings – If I’m connected to the internet shouldn’t they just stream anyway?