From what I could tell when choosing AM over Spotify, the latter has a lot of playlists for discovery and I would never use my streaming service for discovery as it encourages the service to promote music it is paid to promote.
Of course AM is annoying too because 3 out of 5 navigation icons along the bottom of the UI are for discovery. But AM has Siri integration, which works some of the time… :-/
Apple Music has been utterly awful on desktop for years, with virtually zero positive progress. I made this angry video [1] 4 years ago, and have tried using Apple Music multiple times since then, and it never failed to disappoint.
Does Apple care though? It seems that Apple's main focus these days is on mobile "lifestyle" devices and services: iPhone, Siri, and Apple Music fits right into that. How many Apple users actually care about listening to AM on their desktop (presumably a Mac)?
Of course, Apple still pushes its overpriced Macs, but the focus there seems to be on developers (for the more expensive stuff--big monitors, workstations, etc.) or people (probably corporate workers, developers, etc.) using MacBooks. In both cases, the focus seems to be on machines used for doing work. I'm just guessing, but I would guess that most MacOS users who want to listen to (Apple) music would do so on their personal device, i.e. their iPhone, rather than their MacOS device which is probably owned and managed by their employer.
You are spot on. Apple does one thing very good: MacOS + Macs. But I don’t like Apple software. Too limited, too crippled, too unpredictable. And they don’t listen to users, you cannot reach out to someone and hope your feedback will change something.
The new "Apple Music (Preview)" app on Windows (exclusively 11 IIRC) absolutely destroys anything they had in the past. And anything they have on macOS right now. It is absolutely stellar, and yet another example of the weird "let's make out apps on opposing systems better than our native ones" trend.
Oh my god you made this video? I have sent it to so many people to explain my feelings for it. Thank you so much for saying what I wanted to but so much better!
You're welcome. I made that channel with the intention of making more videos about other apps and products, but so far could only muster Apple Music :)
I used to use Apple Music but when my Credit Card expired I missed two months payment and Apple happily deleted all of my playlists and library. I don’t think they realise how bad this is, but I will never use it or subscribe ever again.
I had to pause my subscription for a few months for personal reasons and my collection is gone too.
This is crazy.
Not sure how they expect anyone to keep using their service with such attitude.
Perhaps it is a lock-in strategy: don’t leave or you lose months or even years of your music habits.
At the same time, both Spotify and YouTube Music keep all the data to this day.
One might argue that they free plans, so they have to keep it. And I would say “I don’t care”. If I can’t rely on your service to keep a list of songs - I am not using it.
Damn, they could utilize my iCloud account. Or allow me to export a text file with that data, so I could import it back later. But no. No money - you are screwed.
I don't understand why AM doesn't use iCloud to store playlists. You have the storage anyway and a good chunk of people pay for an additional increase too.
You missed two months of payment and you are angry that a company closed the account? Boy do I have to tell you a story about what you can lose by not paying your AWS bill for two months… I am curious how you handle customers that do not pay and continue to not pay instead of just ending their subscription.
AWS has to pay a relatively big money for keeping user data. It is understandable why they would want to delete it.
Playlists are basically zero cost to store. You would spend more $ on delete processing than keeping them around for eternity. So it's just not well thought use-case, implemented without attempt to view the whole picture.
In many places I worked we would keep a user's history on the app for a long while in case they decided to resubscribe. It doesn't cost much to have a 6-12 months leeway before complete deletion.
Erasing a music app data after just a couple of months is idiotic, even more for a company with such deep pockets like Apple.
What do you lose if you don’t pay to AWS for two months?
My account is still there. I can still use it. I am pretty sure it has some historic data there as well. Probably my old lambdas are still laying around.
I've had songs I uploaded later disappear due to their changing agreements with music providers. A google take-out contained the missing files so I was able to recover them, but I'll never again rely on such an integration.
Could it be hidden behind the "Uploads" section? I have a lot of songs that I've uploaded that aren't available on YouTube, but they don't show up unless you go out of your way to find them in their dedicated section.
Not really. Spotify's "add your music" feature has always been an afterthought, it's clunky and inconvenient. It doesn't really store your files in Cloud, like Apple Music does; it just allows you to access local files per device.
>It doesn't really store your files in Cloud, like Apple Music does; it just allows you to access local files per device.
Perhaps things have changed, but 10 or so years ago I "uploaded" my music to Spotify and it didn't actually upload anything, nor did it play my local music.
Rather, spotify used whatever it had in its database with the same name/artist, which wasn't always the same recording or even the same song.
And then there were the ads. No thanks.
I have my own library of more than 22,000 tracks and use Winamp, Jellyfin and VLC to play them wherever I happen to be. No muss, no fuss, and most importantly, no ads.
From what I could tell when choosing AM over Spotify, the latter has a lot of playlists for discovery and I would never use my streaming service for discovery as it encourages the service to promote music it is paid to promote.
Of course AM is annoying too because 3 out of 5 navigation icons along the bottom of the UI are for discovery. But AM has Siri integration, which works some of the time… :-/