Apple Music now separates albums from singles & EPs on artist pages [updated]

Update: The feature now appears to have fully rolled out, with separate sections for latest releases, albums, live albums, singles & EPs, and playlists.

Apple Music has updated to better separate content items on artist pages. Previously, Apple Music treated albums the same as singles and EPs; the latter would appear as album listings of single tracks. With a behind-the-scenes update rolling out now, artist pages now feature a separate Singles & EPs section, which declutters the Album section to only feature real albums.

Apple continues to improve the appeal of its $9.99/mo music service. Earlier today, Apple Music rolled out new Top 100 playlists.

The new content types are currently viewable only when drilling down into an Artist page. For instance, search Apple Music for ‘Ed Sheeran’ and tap on his official profile page.

The top of the view will feature a strip of albums (tap See All to drill down), and a few rows below, is the new Singles & EPs section.

This is a really big quality-of-change when discovering new artists. Ed Sheeran, for example, has dozens of singles and EP remixes that would bury the real albums. EPs also generally use the same artwork as actual albums, making it even harder to scan and find what you are actually looking for as everything would look the same.

In our testing so far, it does not appear that the main search results screen has been updated to respect the new categories. In search, ‘Albums’ continue to contain all singles and EP tracks intermingled with the real albums. Hopefully, Apple will roll out the same improvements to the search screen.

As many parts of the Apple Music interface are abstracted away to simply present data that the app receives from a server, Apple is able to roll out minor changes like this without needing an iOS software update.