
Why Apple Music is So Bad When the iPhone is so Good - gk1
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-apple-music-is-so-bad-when-the-iphone-is-so-good
======
jedberg
> The people who guided that transition (Netflix's) could offer their insights

I was there for the transition. IT wasn't all that much of a transition.
Netflix was always a company that was digital and used data to make decisions.
We just switch from delivering disks to bits and then had a whole lot more
data to work with.

Apple would need a DNA change -- they treat their services as lead gen for
hardware sales, as the article mentions.

There is no secret, other than they would need to treat their internet
services as a first class citizen along with their hardware group, instead of
as something to make their hardware worth more. But that would mean
acknowledging that there are other hardware platforms out there.

One of the main reason Netflix is currently beating a lot of the other players
is because they work on so many different kinds of hardware from many
competing companies.

If Apple bought Netflix (as this article suggests), it would kill Netflix
unless they let them keep making a 1st class Android app. And that is what
Apple has to do if they want their internet services to be taken seriously --
they have to start acting like Apple hardware isn't the only hardware out
there, and also that maybe people aren't only using Apple apps on their
iPhones.

~~~
datashovel
I don't think it's just the "internet services" that they need to take more
seriously. Ever since I bought my iphone (about 1 week ago) I've had an itch
to write a blog post about my first experiences using their Clock app... Their
CLOCK app :)

~~~
matt4077
Actually, the clock is the only app I use Siri for – it always works and takes
about 1/6 of the time.

~~~
gboss
I think you're actually validating the GP's point that the clock app UI is so
cumbersome it's better to get SIRI to deal with that mess for you.

~~~
nailer
You'll end up with 80 alarms though.

~~~
mjlee
My fiancée has this problem. There's a Siri command to "delete all my alarms".

------
hudibras
What enrages me to no end is that iTunes doesn't work well with my iPod Touch,
_a device designed to play music._

1\. No, I don't want my iPod to use Apple Music by default. I'm carrying a
device with 20GB of music on it, I don't need you to search for a wifi signal
on this train and then try to connect with my non-existent Apple Music
account. And there's no way to shift this default setting to use the iPod
internally-stored music.

2\. Two days ago, I took a deep breath and tried to sync iTunes with my iPod
for the first time in 6 months. All I wanted to do was move my one newly-
purchased album that iTunes had (the new Radiohead, if you want to know) onto
my iPod. I still don't know what happened but it ended up deleting all my
music, which then required a full sync to move those 20GB back onto my iPod
(which, as a reminder, is a device designed to play music.)

~~~
bydo
Issue 1: Settings App -> Music -> Show Apple Music (toggle this off,
obviously)

Issue 2: iTunes being so terrible is probably the best argument against
resolving Issue 1.

I believe the default is not to automatically use Apple Music, though, and
rather to prompt the user to try it. I know that I declined, and haven't seen
it since.

Though the iOS Music app has been getting worse every year regardless. I keep
meaning to write a replacement that just operates mostly the way it did until
iOS 6 or 7.

~~~
sosborn
> I keep meaning to write a replacement that just operates mostly the way it
> did until iOS 6 or 7.

We should partner up and procrastinate together.

~~~
MaysonL
> We should partner up and procrastinate together

I would join that club.

~~~
Natanael_L
I'd think about it, but I'd never get to applying

------
dhagz
Honestly, my biggest gripes with Apple Music come from Apple not being a data-
science-type company.

When I go to the "For You" section of the music app, more often than not I'm
greeted with albums I already have in my library, playlists titled "Intro to
<artist I already listen to>", or random curated playlists that I've recently
browsed through. Basically, it gives me nothing valuable on a regular basis. I
find it very hard to discover new music with Apple Music. With Spotify, there
was my "Discover Weekly" playlist which was perfect - 30 new songs that I
should like given my listening history. And Spotify was fairly good at
recommending new playlists to me as well.

Perhaps with Apple Music I'm taking the wrong approach. It might be more
effective to use Radio for discovery, but for being based on Beats the curated
playlists seem really lacking.

~~~
nihonde
I keep bumping into this problem: a company that has a large media library
(video, music, books) offers a client that lacks the basic search, filtering,
and sorting functions that any half-decent programmer would consider Step One
of a client app. I don't want clever discovery and recommendation algorithms
(which never work, by the way); I want faceted search, filtering, and sorting.
Amazon's storefront is just about the only AAA online service that gets this
more or less right. I just don't understand what is going on at Apple and
Netflix.

~~~
vintermann
_I don 't want clever discovery and recommendation algorithms (which never
work, by the way)_

I take it you haven't tried discover weekly, then?

To be fair, it needs a fair bit of listening history to start making
recommendations. But it is ridiculously good. Since what you will like isn't a
deterministic function of your listening history, it has to take some chances,
you have to accept that it won't always hit. When it does, though, oh boy.

~~~
nihonde
I don't use Spotify. I'll take your word for it, though.

I grew up with radio, and I used to like to listen to the college stations
where there was no format and the selections came from the personal taste of
another person. On Apple Music, the curated playlists are OK in that respect.
Also, since I live in Japan, the "Top 100" lists change really quickly and can
include some interesting and surprising discoveries.

My gripe isn't so much with the efficacy of recommendation engines, anyway.
I'm complaining about the lack of useful basic search/sort/filtering. I would
say about 50% of the searches that I run on Apple Music end with a blank
artist placeholder page, or re-route me into the iTunes Store, or pull up
totally irrelevant results, or otherwise end in confusion because there app,
the store, the library, and the streaming service are all whipped up into a
tangle that no one can seriously be expected to navigate.

------
stcredzero
I really wish the Music app would just act like my old iPod. I have some set
of music available. It's categorized in different ways I can set. It plays
music. Done.

Streaming? Just treat it as a playlist. Remember a song off a stream? Make
that be like an adhoc playlist. Just let me mash a button and play music. Let
me hit a button, and it remembers the current song. Want to let me pick a
stream? Let me navigate just a few steps down a menu and pick something. Hit
play. Music. Done.

~~~
ssmoot
I use it every day. It pretty much does those things. The little Heart button
is your "remember the current song".

The really confusing/annoying thing for me is there's no history AFAIK. So no
looking up the previous song if you didn't get to hit the heart button because
you were driving. Even finding a previous streaming/radio playlist is
impossible sometimes. Click away from it, and now how do you get back? On the
iPad: You don't AFAICT. Best you can do is bring up the Up Next list if you
don't remember the search/navigation that found the playlist in the first
place.

~~~
re
"Heart" actually doesn't function as "remember" as there's no way to see songs
in Apple Music (not in your library) that you've previously "loved"[1]. It's
supposedly used to help refine recommendations[2].

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3bprla/apple_music_w...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3bprla/apple_music_where_do_i_find_my_loved_little_heart/)

[2] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204842](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT204842)

~~~
ssmoot
I could be wrong, but I'm not sure how else they'd be showing up in my library
under "Recently Added" then. I didn't specifically create any new playlists or
anything and it's just the songs I "hearted".

I assumed it was just a "genius" thing at first as well, but there they are.
Maybe it's new.

~~~
parasubvert
I had thought the "plus" button actually did the adding instead of "heart"
which was more algorithm food. But I haven't dug around enough maybe?

------
wodenokoto
I really didn't find it that bad. People who like Spotify are just used to it.

I recently went through all the major ones (that is one way to get a few
months free streaming) on my Android and there really isn't much of a
difference except for the curated lists.

~~~
Nullabillity
> and there really isn't much of a difference except for the curated lists.

I recently switched to Play Music, because they seem to be much friendlier to
my battery life than Spotify. I also prefer their algorithmic discovery
features to Spotify's primarily human-curated approach (which inherently
favours what's mainstream over what _I_ like).

~~~
merijnv
The Spotify "Discover Weekly" seems to do pretty well at finding stuff I like.
Although it does seem to be a bit biased toward some of my tastes more than
others.

~~~
vintermann
Yeah, I've noticed that too. Probably it's a keys under street light
phenomenon, that it prefers to search where it can find the keys (should they
be there) than where they probably are but they wouldn't be able to find them
anyway.

This might explain why they seem overly weighted towards Swedish music in my
DW.

------
CameronBanga
Because it was an acquihire that had to integrate quickly into iTunes.

I'd imagine that integration of Beats into iTunes didn't start in earnest
before the Beats acquisition was final, which was sometime Q4 2014? That gave
essentially 6 months for the integration?

When you think about what's involved in that task, it's probably even more
amazing that it even works as well as it does.

~~~
partiallypro
From my understanding the rights from Beats Music did not carry over with the
acquisition, and Apple Music doesn't use Beats Music in any form. The
acquisition was for the headphones, which have insane margins and are a
"status symbol" that doesn't relate to quality at all...much like Apple
itself.

~~~
matthewmacleod
It might be worth reading up a bit – Beats music was included too, and Apple's
product quality is generally considered to be pretty good.

~~~
partiallypro
That's not what I said, I said the licensing didn't carry over. Of course
Beats Music was included in the purchase, but the deals Beats had with the
music industry (licensing agreements) were nullified during the acquisition,
from my understanding. So building on top of the Beats infrastructure wouldn't
make -that- much sense. I'm sure some code was recycled, but the apps are very
very different from one another. You could argue that Beats was more ironed
out.

Not sure why I was downvoted, you can search online and see analysts
questioning the streaming service deal because of the licensing being unlikely
to carry over post-purchase. You can also see them chiming in on massive
margins that Beats makes from their headphones and how it helps Apple seal
more of the supply chain. The headphones were clearly the play, not Beats
Music.

------
readme
I've found that apple music is extremely reliable, performant, and has a
seemingly complete selection of all the music I'd ever want to listen to.

~~~
collyw
Let me guess, all the tech products you own are made by Apple?

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
That doesn't even matter. I have both an iPhone and Mac and the Music
experience is awful. Match is a danger to your music library and Apple Music
is slow, unreliable, buggy, and the UX is a confusing mess.

The fact that both the Spotify and Google Play iOS apps perform better and are
easier to understand from a UX perspective is embarrassing for Apple.

------
notadoc
Apple should have bought Spotify instead of Beats. They have the money, they
still could.

Spotify is such a far superior service, it works exactly as you'd expect it
to, it has a free tier and a paid tier, it's basically as good as it gets for
a music streaming service.

~~~
stcredzero
It's amazing how much better Spotify is at finding related music I also like.
Pandora, Google Play, that thing in iTunes -- all annoying. The other ones
find bands that sound like bands I like but are annoying. Spotify actually
finds me stuff I'm glad to have discovered. The other ones just find annoying
doppelgangers of my favorite music.

(To be fair, Pandora is better than the others, but dependent on genre. It
does really well with classical music. With lots of electronica/electronica
related music -- very annoying.)

~~~
veritas20
Interesting. I switched from Spotify to Apple Music. The "For You" section
with curated playlists were way better than the Spotify playlists IMO. I only
wish that I could choose an activity (workout, etc.) and/or mood and a genre
and I'd be all set.

~~~
stcredzero
There could be some genre specificity at play here. I like certain stuff
that's influenced by Deep House, but find a lot of things that are "cool" in
House music to be highly annoying. I'm a fan of British Isles traditional
music, but find I already know most of the good stuff. I like certain
contemporary French songwriters, but find most of them kinda samey.

The Spotify equivalent of "For You" is where I'm having the most luck. Maybe
I'll give Apple another go.

~~~
vintermann
Are you talking of DW or the more generic similar artists/discover tab then?
Because the former is far better than the latter.

Funnily enough, it has recommended a lot of British Isles trad/folk to me,
(and also Québécois, for some reason) most of which is OK but some of which is
really interesting. It's found several long medieval ballads, which I would
have thought was far too niche to recommend.

~~~
stcredzero
DW is most fruitful. If you are into British Isles trad/folk, there's a lot of
wonderful Québécois stuff. Those guys often have better Irish trad chops than
local Irish trad prodigies. Then on top of that, add in all the odd
Acadian/french influence. I got to play with some of those guys in Christmas
Revels.

------
cm2187
The iphone WAS so good. Now when I buy an iphone I have to go through 10
dialog boxes of nagging for Apple Pay, Apple Music, iCloud, etc, etc. And
regularly, whether after a system update or a randomly, the nagging starts all
over again. This is really annoying. At one point in the iphone music player,
I would regularly be redirected to the apple music tab while trying to get to
my playlists.

It's a race to the bottom between Apple and Microsoft. I omit Google as I do
not really have any experience with their OS. Are they doing less nagging for
their services?

~~~
josteink
> . I omit Google as I do not really have any experience with their OS. Are
> they doing less nagging for their services?

If you buy a (Nexus) Android device, the device comes preloaded with all the
Google services and apps, but you are only nagged about two things:

1\. log in with a Google Account (for Play Store, Gmail, Calendar and all the
others), and 2. Opting in to Google Location services.

That's about it. What get's annoying though is if you for whatever reason ever
need to factory reset your phone, you will have to go through various splash-
screens and introduction pages in all the apps (Maps, Youtube, Photos, etc)
again.

I'd say the nagging factor on Android (at least for the paid apps I use) are
as close to zero you can get.

Compared to for instance Windows, it feels much better.

~~~
unlinker
Those splash screens are incredibly useless and annoying. I don't understand
why somebody at Google gave the OK to them.

------
travelbyphone
I signed up for Apple Music but returned to Spotify because it's just simpler
and more pleasant to use the Mac app instead of iTunes, and the iOS app works
better for me with its "recently played" list that allows me to better return
to recent discoveries.

Apple Music fails becaus it's not magical like the iPod was versus the
competition. It's a complicated player.

I believe Apple Music should be more like Google for music. A big search
button and a recently played music easily accessible, also publicly playable
widgets so you could share music on the web instead of resorting to YouTube.

------
dingo_bat
I like Apple music on android. It works quite well, even if there are some
kinks to work out. The thing that stops me from using it full time instead of
Spotify is that the Windows client is iTunes. And I'm not going to install
iTunes. There's a part of my brain which is permanently scarred due to iTunes.

------
vinceguidry
iTunes has become so horrible over the years that on my list of products I
want to launch in my lifetime is a music player / manager. Every one I've ever
seen is horrendous. None of them allow me to manage music in anything
approaching a sane fashion. None of them allow me to add music from multiple
sources, forcing me to deal with multiple entries in a dumb library.

My music library is huge, but I have no desire to listen to every single song
on it. My shuffle pool is a hand-curated selection of some 500 tracks out of
perhaps 10,000. I can recreate the pool when I have to but it's a phenomenal
pain in the ass.

I used to do okay with the checked song feature in iTunes. But the checks are
not respected by the software and there's no easy way to back them up and
restore. After enough times syncing my phone to find songs that I'd unchecked
magically got checked again, I switched to manual management.

I hate keeping state on my laptop but I've had to learn to put up with keeping
it on my phone because Apple is just horrible at it. More than once I've lost
all that state and had to recreate it. It's a skill I don't want to have to be
good at.

Fucking Apple. If they can't figure this shit out, then one day I'm going to
eat their lunch. It would not be hard at all to make a music app that's 10x
better than their tripe.

~~~
cageface
I've been very happy with Swinsian:

[http://swinsian.com](http://swinsian.com)

The UI is pretty utilitarian but everything seems to work.

~~~
vinceguidry
My music lives on my iPhone. If it can't manage device libraries then it's
useless to me.

~~~
coldtea
Add 3-4 more similar demands from other users with different use cases, and we
can see how iTunes got to be what it is...

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
Google Play has these features (upload and stream your entire library on any
device) and it works great.

~~~
vinceguidry
The problem I had with Android was that the Bluetooth support for the Nexus
device was shit. That turned out to be a much worse problem than the library
management issues I'm having with Apple. If I can't even have a satisfactory
experience streaming music to my car, that's just a total non-starter. It
would be like a phone that could do everything but make calls, but I actually
use my device way more for music than for phone calls.

------
hannibalhorn
Serious question - why not just open it up to third party developers? Just
provide a sanctioned API to play (& save offline) tracks, and then let
independent apps compete to come up with the best interface, tailored to
individual tastes, as long as the end user has an Apple Music subscription.

~~~
viraptor
Walled gardens and being control freaks. That's been the status quo for years.
It's been what devs complained about for ages too. ("I made that app, then
Apple released something similar but worse, and now they reject my app from
the store.")

I don't know why though... maybe it's just about keeping customers in the
ecosystem? Most common reason I hear for getting an Apple product lately is "I
have other things from Apple and they work together". Slightly ignoring the
fact you're just burying yourself deeper in Apple dependencies rather than
getting something that works with iOS/OSX _and_ other systems.

------
baby
I recently tested them all (because I moved abroad and couldn't move on the
local app store without losing all my songs I had on iTunes match) and the
only one that worked well for me is Google Music. I can upload all my songs
there, it kept my playlists, my library is separated from their own catalog.
It's not perfect, I wish iTunes match and Google music could meet in the
middle. But I'm scared for the future of iTunes Match and I can't mass
download my music from it so...

Here's the spreadsheet to compare the services btw:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ptV0sWO2tBT4c3G8aiB0...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ptV0sWO2tBT4c3G8aiB0WgQ7asZFK2WBoIlg8OcBKg8/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
cheshire137
That Chromecast line is what does it for me. Google Music or Spotify are my
only options. Fortunately, I like them both pretty well.

------
james4k
I moved away from Apple because of their awful software.. their Podcast app
was probably the worst one. Granted, I was stuck on iOS 7 because I had an
iPhone 4, so maybe they stopped supporting it, but it was basically unusable.

------
Spooky23
I think the press echo chamber trope about how "Apple is a hardware company"
is lazy thinking.

WWDC last year provided a simple explaination explaining the whole Music
shitshow -- remember the incoherent presentation?

Cook probably delegated the Music product to Dr Dre and Iovine, and they
grafted their music insights and radio on top of Music.app, which was a mess
to begin with. ...Or some similar organizational mess where lots of big egos
weighed in hit and run style.

Remember, the PR push from Apple last year was all about how brilliant Ive, Dr
Dre and Iovine were. There was a wired cover gushing about how they were
"saving" music.

~~~
jimmaswell
Their hardware isn't even that great. iPhone screens are still too small,
iPhones still need proprietary poorly-designed cables, they have a track
record of buttons easily wearing out or breaking, and their laptops are
unreasonably thin to the point of being detrimental to usability (only two usb
ports, need a special adapter to connect hdmi/dvi/vga).

~~~
threeseed
You want a bigger iPhone than the iPhone 6S+ ? That's strange.

And the MacBook Pro comes up with DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. DVI/VGA are
very much legacy connections. All their other MacBoosk come with DisplayPort.
And given how well they are selling I would argue that nobody is really
clamouring for more than 2 USB ports or additional connectors.

~~~
collyw
It doesn't seem especially strang. I regularly see people with phones bigger
than the iPhone 6. I assume they chose them because they wanted them that
size.

------
3ris3d
Not a fan of apple music, mainly because I find my chord with Spotify earlier.
But pinning the unpopularity (or rather low popularity) of the app to Apple
"not" being an internet company or being a hardware-first company is probably
near sighted. Which app has a universal "reliability and likable UX design"?
To each its own! I feel a lot of "new" users might be (and am pretty sure are)
finding their good vibes with apple too.

------
qq66
The smaller userbase of Apple services compared to Google Maps/Spotify creates
not only a data disadvantage but an incentive disadvantage. Apple needs to
make Maps or Music or iMessage only good enough to keep you on the iPhone.
Google has dozens of businesses dependent on great maps, from advertising to
Maps API to self-driving cars, and thus will always invest more engineering
and more labor into the service.

~~~
bogomipz
Please elaborate on those number if you are going to make statements like
that. Citation? Apples music has 11 million paid subscribers. I don't think
thats a data disadvantage. Considering the service is less than a year old
even less so.

~~~
qq66
Yes, what I'm saying is that the incentive disadvantage is much bigger than
the data disadvantage. Apple Maps is worse than Google Maps because Apple
cannot justify the kinds of investments in product that Google can.

------
daigoba66
I miss Rdio.

------
sblawrie
I tried switching over from Spotify to Apple Music when someone in my family
bought a family plan and it became free for me, but after a few months I
switched back to paid Spotify. For me, free Apple Music < Paying for Spotify.
I just felt like I couldn't get around Apple Music intuitively and it became
frustrating.

------
schwarrrtz
> Similarly, all of Apple’s services—iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Photos,
> iMessage—exist to support the sales of phones, tables, and laptops.

I have to say, a HomeKit-enabled table would be an interesting strategic play.

------
Aoyagi
What a loaded title. I don't see anything that makes the device special.

------
stblack
iTunes is so bad, I stopped using iPhoto/Photos years ago simply because, of
you can't do music, you certainly won't be managing my keepsake memories.

The file system, named, organized and managed by ME, remains the only thing I
trust. You know what else is great about that? No foisting of album art.

~~~
danieldk
Actually, Photos is pretty great for a free program that doesn't sell your
data. I don't use iCloud for photos, but I do use Photos occasionally for raw
editing. By now it's good enough to replace my slightly old Lightroom license.

Of course, when I am done editing, the photos live on my filesystem +
encrypted backups :).

------
dabit3
I love Apple Music, just my 2cents

~~~
joenathan
That's more like 1 cent. Why do you love it? What do you love about it?

~~~
wodenokoto
off-topic, but is there a difference between the how many cents you use in
this idiom?

~~~
echelon
The idiom is always "two cents". The parent was implying that because the GP
didn't add much to the conversation that this subtracted a cent.

~~~
jeeva
There is a little use of five cents here. Not lots, but it's not unknown for
it to change amount.

...still no correlation, though.

------
LargeCompanies
THe interface is bloated, but for me Siri, Apple Music and driving is pretty
solid & safer then using other music apps in the car.

------
looping84
you can use netease music

------
looping84
you can have a try Netease Music

