Prior to the launch of Apple Music, I had a Spotify Premium subscription. Although I listened to my own music a good 80% of the time, I considered the equivalent of one album purchase a month to be decent value to have access to other music when I felt like something new.
But while Spotify didn’t much change the way I listened to music, Apple Music really has. Its ‘For You’ recommendations – especially the playlists – are so good that the 20% streaming I used to do has now grown to 50%. As I mentioned in my Apple Music Diary series, the service has introduced me to more new artists I really like than Spotify did in all the years I used it – despite my initial concerns that it wouldn’t do so.
But the very effectiveness of Apple Music in introducing me to so much new music has thrown up a couple of problems …
The first is that I miss having on-demand access to those playlists when I don’t have a data connection. I spent Christmas in Hong Kong, which involved two 11-hour flights. I’m not much of a TV or movie guy, so I listen to a lot of music when travelling. I’d saved a few For You playlists to my iPhone, but of course couldn’t access new ones.
I’d love it if Apple Music auto-downloaded the most recent For You playlists whenever I’m on Wi-Fi so that they were available to me when I don’t have access to mobile data.
It could work just like subscribed podcasts, where we specify the number of playlists to keep. Apple’s Podcast app, for example, lets us choose between the 2, 3, 5 and 10 most recent. In that way, we have access to them when we need them without taking up lots of storage. And by limiting the downloading to when we’re on Wi-Fi, it wouldn’t use any mobile data.
The other issue I really wish Apple would solve once and for all is lyrics. There have been a wide range of third-party solutions for adding lyrics to music on Apple devices, both for iTunes on the Mac and the Music player on the iPhone. MusixMatch, for example, displays lyrics in the Notification Center.
But third-party apps suffer from three issues. First, they don’t offer lyrics for every track. It depends on whether Apple includes the data in the track, or whether they can be matched from independent sources. Second, they sometimes have a clunky UI – like having to view the Notification Center rather than staying in the Music app. Third, it’s not unusual for an iTunes update to break a lyrics plugin on the Mac. I’ve had several over the years that worked well for a time but stopped working temporarily or permanently following a new version of iTunes.
Apple says that it cares deeply about music, and to me lyrics are fundamental to much of my favorite music. Apple is in the perfect position to solve the problem once and for all: agree with the labels that they provide embedded lyrics, and make lyric display a standard feature in both Music and iTunes.
Would either feature be of interest to you? Please let us know by taking our poll. If you have Apple Music feature requests of your own, please share them in the comments.
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Lyrics you can forget it, because lyrics are licensed outside the songs, and Apple would have to pay more for them.
lyricsmania does the same thing.
Apple has the negotiating clout and cash to offer this. Thanks for the Lyrics Mania suggestion – I’ll check it out.
I miss pandora’s write ups on artists for the now playing screen. There is hardly any information about artists, even if you dig down from the my playing. It was a feature I really liked when I heard a new band and wanted to know more about them.
I’m just now trying Apple Music (been a happy Spotify customer, but decided to try out AM anyway) and the biggest thing that I have a problem with is the lack of auto-downloading. Offline (downloaded) music is important to me because I spend a large part of my commute in the subway, where reception is spotty.
On Spotify I can set any playlist to auto-download to my phone. If that playlist is updated/extended with new songs then those songs are automatically downloaded to my phone. This works for the hand curated playlists (of which, Spotify has MANY more than AM) and auto generated playlists (Top 100 Indie, “Discover Weekly” (which is essentially “For You”), etc)
I love having an always up to date library of Music synced to my phone. When I travel I don’t Sven think about the music I have downloaded… because at any one I have several hundred good, fresh songs to listen to all without me doing anything.
AM is the exact opposite. You can’t even download their curated playlists (the “stations”). For instance, I wanted to load all of the songs currently in the “Dance Workout” station onto my Watch (Watch capability is the main reason I’m even trying AM). I had to manually skip through the station and save each song to an offline playlist of my own making. What a pain!
At this point… I’m still sticking with Spotify. The ONLY thing that AM does better is allowing me to load music on my Watch. Everything else is worse.
Huh, why are you trying to download a “station”. You know you can’t do that right? U can only download playlists for offline use. Not sure what you are trying to say here because offline playlists work fine the way you described
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Where are the curated playlists that are updated weekly that I can set to download automatically?
I understand that the stations can’t be downloaded… but the stations are the closest thing to the “Top 100 Indie” and such playlists that are on Spotify.
It’s completely possible that I have simply missed the weekly updated AM playlist section. On Spotify there are literally hundreds that are kept up to date constantly. Where are those on AM?
On Spotify I would go to Music->(Pick a Genre) and then have access to dozens of up to date playlists I can set to sync for offline use… all of which are constantly updated.
In particular I listen to “Happy Hipster”, “Top 100 Indie” and “Electro Workout”. Where can I find analogs to those on AM? The closest I’ve been able to find is the “Radio” stations… Which, like you said, can’t be saved for offline use.
Ok – I did some more exploring and found some interesting playlists. It’s a little harder to find playlists I’m interested in… but the ones I found look good. I’ll continue to give it a shake. Thanks for rebutting me :-)
I use the lyrics feature in Amazon Prime Music a lot….its quite nice really
I just want Handoff with Apple Music
Yes, that’s a great idea.
Handoff is an interesting idea for Music and bluetooth headphones. Like you get into the office and just click on handoff and it switches over the headphone connection too.
Great article i totally agree that missing these features is a major set back theres one other feature in addition to these that i miss like crazy from spotify… and its the ability to use one of the best and most touted (By apple) music apps on the app store.. djay / djay pro i find it funny that apple would promote an app so much that its own music application doesn’t support.. with spotify you are able to use their music library to mix your favorite songs and even host parties while being the djay however now that ive made my move to Apple im left in a strange state.. and possibly debating going back to Spotify its sad that theres no developer API for access to Apple Music (to the best of my knowledge anyways) but Beats had one and Spotify definitely has one
My biggest wish is to stay in a country where For You works, not the poor implementation we got that caused me to cancel my subscription. Especially annoying was the limited genres and matches to the non-commercial, non-local music in my library. So much for curated music…
I’d also like to get the complete credits to a song and/or album, I like to know who plays what, who produced it, who wrote it.
I’d be more interested in the Radio features:
– give us the ability to delete stations
– give us the ability to mark a song as suitable for a radio station
– give us the ability to start a radio station from a given playlist (e.g. relaxed jazz or salsa Cubana)
– maaaaybe give us the ability to merge stations, though the “AI” behind this may not be as happy about this suggestion
Couldn’t agree more on the playlists and “for you”. I went 2 hours the other day liking every song that came on. Unfortunately, I listen to almost all my music through Sonos and one thing that I could do on Spotify that I can’t do (yet) on Apple Music is add those songs to my Apple Music “my music” and/or playlists while in the Sonos app. I hope that is coming soon.,
Apple cares so deeply about music and the experience people have with it, that, it doesn’t have any direct way for me to go back to songs that I personally ‘hearted’. But there’s an entire ‘For You’ section dedicated to stuff Apple thinks I should like. But I’m sure they’ll include ‘Favourites’ as an auto-generated, auto-updated playlist in 2020.
Offline playlists need some definite work with Apple Music – in addition to what youve said here, I really wa.tn to see them add the ability to copy offline tracks to the ipod nano, I dont want to do anything but copy them to the nano from one itunes instance, so they can block the rest. Similarly, I still want the ability top copy local music files from the machine hosting the primary itunes library to the phone. You cant do this now with apple music enabled, you have to download them to the phone over wifi and it will only copy those tracks that are in your icloud library.
Once you add a playlist to your library and set it to download, it will download new songs whenever they are available, or that playlist gets changed. I think you need to have automatic music download turned on in settings. I’ve got it already set with For You and New Music.