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Feature Request: Apple Music needs collaborative streaming radio stations & playlists

As much as I think the Apple Music user interface is still a total jumbled mess, I do think there are also a few features that Apple should add as it simultaneously cleans up what’s already there. A big one for me is the potential for private, collaborative playlists and streaming radio stations.

What Apple Music currently has, as far as users sharing music goes, is the ability to share a playlist, station, album or song from within the app via email, third-party apps or copying the link to share elsewhere. But once sent to someone, the person only receives a link to open the shared selection in Apple Music. It works, but it’s not exactly taking full advantage of the potential for user collaboration and a truly interactive experience that ties together the various social aspects of the service.

The new sharing features could be twofold. First, the ability to have collaborative playlists that one or more other people could contribute to. That’s a feature that some competitive services, notably Spotify, already have, but I’d like to see Apple take it a step further with the ability to create not just collaborative playlists, but private, custom radio stations that stream in real-time…

These would essentially let any user create their own Beats-style stations for streaming content from Apple Music. A private radio station could be shared among friends and family with similar musical tastes and Apple could even automatically generate content based on the entire groups’ listening history (or through manual selection), while public stations could be made available for anyone to search for and subscribe to. Celebrity created stations, for example, could be featured through Apple’s Connect profile pages (and Connect artists could perhaps even feature or debut their own content live that isn’t yet on Apple Music). The custom radio stations could have several contributors separate from subscribers, and Apple could provide some way for users listening to the station to communicate through chat or commenting-like functionality tied to the station.

These features could make Apple Music have more of a community feel opposed to being just the streaming version of the iTunes Store it currently is for the most part.

Apple Music’s current radio station sharing setup

In a way it’s something Apple is already doing under its own control with mostly celebrity shows and features on its Beats 1 station and playlists it surfaces from popular media outlets and other playlist services (pictured above). Users can also share a “radio station” that Apple auto curates based on a song you choose, but once shared, the user on the other end simply just starts the same process on their own based on that song. Users don’t really have a lot of control over that content and after a station is shared there isn’t much interaction between users. Private radio stations would be a community driven feature that could boost sharing and listening of the content already on the service. I love the feel of tuning into a live radio station with Beats 1, but I don’t want to be tied to Apple’s roll-out of radio stations or restricted to Apple’s content choices on its own stations and playlists. I’d like to listen to content of my own choosing with others in the same way. 

And these sharing features could also extend to in-person situations with groups for a DJ mode type feature for parties and other social gatherings. This could essentially be accomplished with collaborative playlists, but Apple could make it even more interesting by giving even non-subscribers an easy way to add to your currently playing collaborative Apple Music playlist or radio station through their own device.

Apple Music’s current playlist sharing features

It’s not something the other music services do particularly great and there isn’t really any one third-party app that has broke through as great solution, although there are a ton of apps out there trying to offer similar features for DJ modes or collaborative playlists that tie into the various music services. Spotify has collaborative playlists for example, and Samsung and others have attempted to integrate similar group sharing features for audio and video content.

I’ve been playing with pinwheel.fm, a new in beta Mac app that will offer collaborative streaming radio stations not unlike what Apple could offer (pictured below). Instead of using Apple Music, however, Pinwheel uses SoundCloud content and in the future will integrate with YouTube and Spotify as well. Even in its very early state of development, playing with Pinwheel gave me a glimpse of just how much Apple Music is lacking. Pinwheel shows you users online, and songs “on deck”, while any user can add songs by entering a SoundCloud URL. The station streams in real-time, which means the pause button is really just a mute button for you.

These type of features were harder to do before streaming services. But in a world where all of your friends are subscribed to Apple Music or a similar service, there is big new potential for sharing and collaboration features that currently none of the services are fully embracing. That’s been one of the most enjoyable aspects of streaming services and Apple Music for me in general. Discussing and sharing music with one another is something my friends and I do often, so the ability to send each other links to playlists and songs that we can all instantly listen to without having to purchase or take other steps to download or find, has kept me using the service despite its many flaws. But adding in the collaborative playlist and radio station features above for me would make for a killer feature that the app and its competitors currently don’t have. 

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Comments

  1. Dbolander - 8 years ago

    For this to happen, Eddy and his top tier of execs and marketing folks would have to retire. They have shown again and again that they no nothing about Social.

  2. Totally agree. I’d also like to see more live radio stations alongside NPR, ESPN and BBC World. It’d be fantastic if the local radio station feeds that were/are in iTunes could be incorporated here. I’d love to listen to my local news and sports this way.

  3. uniszuurmond - 8 years ago

    Apple Music is a bell curve product. It works well for those on the bell curve, and not at all for those on either side. I would like them to do nothing more than get it to work for me, in my country, with my non-commercial music taste. My first three months was a disaster, and I didn’t continue my subscription.

  4. Joe Pana - 8 years ago

    they should do collaborative playlists and also public user playlists. i’ve found way more music that way on spotify than on AM

  5. twalkerp (@twalkerp) - 8 years ago

    i like apple music but don’t love it. I can agree this feature would be nice. Somehow I think their iCloud syncing has been a mess and caused them to really stumble on software side…they tried to tie all the devices together into a beautiful eco-system and it has largely failed and caused me more problems and headaches than ever before. And I think they would struggle to add any more complexity to the system even something like this.

    Apple Music is not for power users. I wish it were. Here is hoping that Trent Reznor takes the helm of Eddy Cue. :)

  6. RP - 8 years ago

    Playlists are fundamental

  7. The setup process stopped me in my tracks. I’ve never heard of most of those suggested bands, and of the ones who’s names I do recognize, I couldn’t tell you if they were heavy metal or classical. No clue. Yet you can’t skip that section. So I chose the only bands I recognized even though they’re not remotely bands I listen to. This is plain stupid. The entire idea is supposed to be about DISCOVERY. But first you need to be an expert on all modern bands. Then it recommends music I have zero interest in. So in order to discover new music, you first have to prove you know about music. Like WTF!?!?! Was ANYONE thinking here??? And I’m not alone. Many of my friends listen to music all day long but could not tell you the name of a band. So it seems the creators, Dr Dre I presume, are –absurdly– out of touch with the music scene they purport to be the global gurus of. I have never paid for Apple Music, and as long as it remains the way it is, I never will be. AppleMusic is tailored to people that are experts in music, not normal people.

    So what do I listen to? I choose the themed selections on Spotify and I love it. Though I just cancelled my pro subscription to Spotify because of the recent hack.

    Like Siri. Or being able to find a file on your Mac, Apple really has dropped the ball in so many areas. For the first time in my life I’m considering switching platforms, but to WHAT, Windoze? Can we bring back OS 7 when everything just worked?

  8. Paul Peachin - 8 years ago

    The new iTunes, which I signed up for at 10am one day and cancelled at noon, This does not feel like an apple product… I’m not going to spend, struggle, with all the you can do this’s and thats’s/ – first I want what I have at Pandora.. and then expand from there. At Pandora I give them a list of my favorite songs, artists, etc. and they randomly select and shuffle the list playing songs from any on my list… or I can select 6 on my list and they will narrowly shuffle songs from that list – and intertwine like artists and songs. $4.99 a month and exactly what I want… I figured from there I could expand my experiences on iTunes…. don’t tell me what I need… give what I want first!

    • Paul Peachin - 8 years ago

      my list at Pandora could include 100 artists, songs, types, I thought about signing up at Sonus same… don’t have it….

  9. cleesmith2 - 8 years ago

    Apple Music is still half-baked. For starters, let anyone curate playlists. You connect with them using…. well… Connect. Expand the Beats radio stations. I happen to like Beats 1 even if I dont like all the hip hop.

  10. Kyle Bavender - 8 years ago

    1. Collaborative playlists (recently did my wedding playlists by using a collaborative Spotify playlist with fiancé, then copied them over to iTunes)
    2. Following an artist should give me a notification whenever they release new music (or announce a concert near my area — this would greatly help the artists)
    3. Connect needs to significantly grow — “connect” deeper with artists, add friends/followers, follow curators/brands.
    4. I could go on…

    I’ll stick with Apple Music for the Siri/OS integration + good family plan option + integration with my iTunes library that has many tracks not found on the iTunes store. But that doesn’t mean it’s an insanely great product, by any stretch. It’s “just good enough” for me, and “not good enough” for quite a few people I know.

  11. Does Apple Music really not have shared/public playlists like Spotify? I always figured that it was there somewhere but I just couldn’t find it…

Author

Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s Logic Pros series.