The one thing that sours the entire experience for me is that songs take like 5-15s to start playing when selecting one that isn't super popular.
This happens on my ipad, mac, android phone.
It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it.
Apart from that, why the hell is the title and artist only shown in one line that starts scolling instead of showing multiple lines if it doesn't fit, at least in the album view and the player. It's such a pain listening to classical music when the composer and the performer and section are not visible without playing it and waiting for the line to scroll, like wtf.
These streaming platforms are so bad. We had better software in the 90s and 00s. These trillion dollar corporations can't beat literally decades old technology. The only reason these little services even exist in the first place is to satisfy the whims of copyright monopolists. How many more steps backwards must this industry take before they're satisfied?
>These streaming platforms are so bad. We had better software in the 90s and 00s.
You are sitting in a chair in the sky.
I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee. In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15. In the 2000s I was finding stuff that I could pirate, downloading it, and playing it on my beige desktop computer because there was no such thing as a smartphone.
The software was still better. You're right that we have better, easier and cheaper access to the music we want, but that's unrelated to the software we use to play the music or manage the playlist.
You can still buy music on Apple Music, it's not copy protected if I recall correctly, then play it back in WinAmp. That would currently be the best experience from both eras.
Software doesn't matter, what matters is the experience.
Apple Music simply isn't a great app but everyone can vote with their wallet and switch to something else.
Having music only on your desktop computer and takes space isn't the best experience for the absolute majority of people. But it's good that the ones who want can still do that.
If there was music I wanted to listen to, OiNK[1] had it. Had it been allowed to survive, I'm sure it would have evolved into something far better than our current options. I'm willing to pay for music but not a huge fan of songs/albums randomly disappearing from my library due to some licensing decision[2].
They are strictly interview based, if you want a lower hassle orpheus.network still does invites. Smaller site but they get a good % of their releases from redacted.
> In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15.
That is unfortunate. In the early 2000s, I was cleaning up buying used CDs for $1 on Half.com and Amazon.
The whole thing about "1 good song on a 10-song album" is a remnant of Steve Jobs' iPod marketing pitch designed to get people buying songs piecemeal for 99c on iTunes.
Regular people buy music if they want to support the artist. Trying to maximize the number of good songs per dollar spent is a kind of alien calculus that's led us down this path of algorithm-driven one-hit-wonder hell.
> The whole thing about "1 good song on a 10-song album" is a remnant of Steve Jobs' iPod marketing pitch
Yup. I remember people used claim "piracy would ruin the quality of music" - but the truth is, it's these streaming services that are killing the art of the album.
True, but don’t forget that much of the mid-20th century was “single” focused, and the concept of a full cohesive LP only came about in the mid-60’s (there are earlier examples for but think Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, or The Beatles). Meanwhile, most people still consume top-40 style hits from the radio, etc. for decades after.
But in the 1990s we were travelling without moving through the aggregate of everybody's music collection that they already paid for.
In the 2000s we were using idle bandwidth to move the distribution cost closer to zero than ever before.
In light of that, I wonder if in a decade you'll be praising an uncomfortable sardine can that drags us across the desert with better than 25% departure delays.
>But in the 1990s we were travelling without moving through the aggregate of everybody's music collection that they already paid for.
It sounds as if you are claiming that because person X already paid for a CD, everybody else connected to them via Napster has a right to listen to that music. If so, I disagree. People complain that Spotify et al. underpay musicians. Piracy pays them zero.
Meanwhile: I pay once for all the music on Spotify; I can listen to stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T-H-fVlHE0 which was never available pirated; anything I want starts playing within seconds; and it's conveniently provided to me on my phone, along with playlists that regularly find me music and podcasts I like. Which aspect was better in the 2000s?
I personally don’t find that to be true. Time for some objective anecdata.
There is a site [0] that ranks how “mainstream” one’s listening habits are based on their last.fm profile.
Punching in my username, I get ranked as 12% mainstream (i.e., only 12% of last.fm users listen to music more obscure than mine). Keep in mind, this is relative to last.fm users, whose musical tastes are probably more obscure than the general population.
Approximately 95% of my lossless library is on Spotify or Apple Music. So I’d say they’re doing a pretty good job maintaining a comprehensive catalog.
Apple Music has a feature based on iTunes Match that will take your local files and attempt to match them based on their metadata and audio fingerprint.
The last time I used it, from my (then) ~5000 song library, it matched ~3600. That means that a good third of the music I listen to is not available in the same exact version on streaming services.
I dug into why, and reasons include:
- The LPs were never licensed properly. Such as Exmilitary by Death Grips, which is a bootleg release with copyright issues.
- The artist hasn't signed up for streaming, like it used to be the case with Tool. Or they only stream on one platform and not another. Dr. Dre and Jay-Z come to mind. All three artists I mentioned in this bullet are "really mainstream."
- The version I like is not the streaming release. I like the casette version of Ashes 2 Ashes, Dust 2 Dust by Tommy Wright III, but not the CD reissue.
- The artist is actually too niche. I have quite a few things in my collection from Bandcamp or Soundcloud that don't exist elsewhere.
- The release is "weird." Like the radio stations from the classic GTA games.
Also, Apple Music allows you to just put any music in there and sync across devices, if you're missing something.
The reason between Apple Music and iTunes Match is that the latter doesn't replace your existing copies with the alternatives it find in its database. AM will gladly do it unless what you have offline is truly unique.
That site says I'm at 6%, and I agree 95%+ is accurate. Some particularly obscure stuff is only on YouTube or Bandcamp, that's maybe 3%, another 1-2% is simply unavailable due to various licensing issues, generally odd albums for artists that have most of their content available. If you go way, way down the long tail of 400-youtube-view music from decades ago, most of it won't be available anywhere except YouTube and pirate sites, both with spotty coverage.
I don't know how well iTunes tracks with music available on other streaming platforms, but when I imported my library of ~700 CDs to iTunes Match about 40% of my tracks matched, and 60% had to be uploaded, so I suspect that for me there is a lot that isn't on any platform (but is on iTunes match.) Which is why I don't subscribe to any streaming service.
How do you see the match rate? I've been using iTunes Match for years and really prefer it over services like Spotify. But I've always wondered how much of my content wasn't available on the mothership.
Oh please. And in the "old days" you couldn't buy just any random indie music in a record store either. Yes, "any" music is obviously an exaggeration for a mainstream music streaming service. I'm guessing I own a few things that aren't on Apple Music or Spotify. But the vast vast majority of music most people in the West listen to is on the streaming services. It certainly isn't just Top 40.
I’ll post my playlist and you tell me how much of it you’ve heard on the radio.
Sure, maybe you won’t find that one band from the 90s you loved that played a few shows and only ever recorded anything on tapes that have been obscured over time.
But one of the reasons I use streaming over the radio is because streaming libraries offer 1000x times the diversity of any radio station or chart.
>I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee.
Which is not that great in itself.
Streaming is for the 5% of the people obsessed with variety over building a relationship with select music (and who does that while claiming its a "false dichotomy"), and casual listening skimmers (the 95%).
Why is that not great? I’ve been a Spotify user for years. The Discover Weekly, “artist radio, and daily mix playlists allow me to find other bands I’d otherwise overlook. Finding/sharing playlists with others is a joy.
Because it's not about endless consumption of new artists, which soon lose their value in the endless supply of replacements, but about getting in depth with fewer...
I’ve been seriously considering going back to owning a big library of mp3s. I love Spotify for its suggestions - well, when it’s not just playing the same 8 songs on repeat. And I love having my music available on all my devices.
But the experience of playing songs feels like it’s taken a big step backwards into some sort of weird corporate happy land. The fact I we still can’t remove podcasts from Spotify is ridiculous. I tried Apple Music but I bounced almost immediately because of the UI.
> I’ve been seriously considering going back to owning a big library of mp3s.
I never left! Every once in a while I go and try Streaming again to see if they have gotten their shit together, and they still haven't. My hand-curated collection of MP3s, hand-ripped by me using the quality settings I like, carefully stored in a directory structure I understand, with filenames that make sense to me, meticulously tagged with the right metadata, gives me everything I need for music listening, and it doesn't require the Internet or a subscription to play. With hard drive sizes today, the cost of storage for a library of every music I would ever want to listen to is a rounding error. I don't care about discovery and engagement and royalty costs and all those metrics streaming companies optimize for.
What platform (linux/mac/windows) are you on, and which apps do you use to manage/consume it? Do you use a streamer (like plex, jellyfin, etc) or do you load your whole collection on every device?
Have you tried plex/jelly-amp? Plexamp attempts recommendations and does a good job streaming / keeping media between devices (although for some reason you can't copy the entire library, only playlists/albums/artists?)
Why compete on merit when you have an insurmountable marketing/advertising advantage?
A feature of the modern smartphone ownership experience is being bombarded with ads for clones of existing businesses, the best of which are almost as good as those pre-existing offerings.
The Music, TV, News, and Books icons on the home screen are really just ads. Each of these "apps" contains a prominent ad, followed by a torrent of push notification ads.
In a way, the home screen is a re-imagining of AOL from the 90s: a crippled proprietary take on the web, spoon-fed to a captive audience, lacking the egalitarianism that allows companies like Spotify and Netflix to thrive.
We need to distinguish ability and willingness. And nobody will ever be satisfied, it's a constant struggle for control, from all sides. For what they cost, I think the streaming services in general offer a good deal. Not that I'm overly satisfied with any of them.
I was astounded at how bad Apple Music is. I’m not talking about missing features or lack of polish, but that I’d click play on a song and a different song on the list would start playing. And this bug persisted for months on the web version before I left. The mobile app was just so lacking as well.
Not at all what I expect from apple. Honestly the only reason Spotify still exists is because Apple and Google are doing such a dismal job.
Youtube Music (Google Music successor) is shaping up really well. It was buggy for a while (and in fact that exact bug of clicking on a song and a different song playing was on youtube music), but either I've got major Stockholm Syndrome or it's gotten really polished.
All that said though, G killed the public API for music which is a horrible tragedy to me. I may yet still go back to spotify just for the API.
>songs take like 5-15s to start playing when selecting one that isn't super popular. It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it.
If it's really that long, it sounds like it's literally spinning up an actual vinyl record.
I've never seen a search box that couldn't actually handle input before, but Apple Music made it.
If I click in the search box and start typing, the box will lose focus at some random time and all my next keystrokes will count as play commands, usually pausing the music. If I come back to the search box, it happens again.
I know "text boxes" are cutting-edge technology that's barely 3 seconds old and developers are still learning to program them safely. Still, I expected more from a trillion-dollar company.
I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line.
More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
It is nice to be able to buy the music as well if you want to support. Being part of Apple One is huge as well.
The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows.
PLATFORM ROYALTY (PER STREAM) STREAMS TO MAKE $1
Tidal Music $0.01284 78
Apple Music $0.008 125
Amazon Music $0.00402 249
Spotify $0.00318 314
YouTube Music $0.002 500
Pandora $0.00133 752
Deezer $0.0011 909
I have lots of mp3/stored music as well and Spotify client started taking like 20-30 minutes to start up. Wasn't sure what it was doing...
Some of their patents for tracking are a bit dystopian as well.
New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music
> The streaming platform is interested in extracting data points like emotional state, gender, age, and accent to hone its recommendations [2].
Nah. Apple already has my info and reasonably treats it well eventhough it is too much, I don't need another service to invade privacy.
> I like Apple Music because it integrates well with the Apple line.
Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music.
> More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foot by neglecting user experience.
I do like a more open/api platform and wish Apple was, but Spotify probably won't be for long. Tracking my plays takes more work with everything to closed.
Apple misses some of the obscure stuff but I will always side with the higher payer to artists. I also like just being able to buy albums I like and support artists.
Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.
I guess I’m just not sure what sort of “gotcha” this is supposed to be. The beauty of incentive alignment is that you don’t have to waste your time trying to discern nebulous motivations of large groups of people.
> Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.
All the money that streaming services pay out goes to copyright holders. Guess who the copyright holders are. If you say "artists", think again. For the absolute vast majority of music it's the Big Four/Three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
So, when the likes of Spotify pay 60-70% of their revenue to the record labels, and the artists get peanuts... Spotify (and Tidal, and Apple Music, and...) get blamed. Now this is a real puzzler.
If they just sold it, then no? They might get more for their next sale, though I imagine the count of streams is more influential for that than the revenue per stream
Because if royalties are function of licensing volume, it makes no difference who you choose. If more people ditched Spotify for Apple Music, they’d start getting more favorable rates with record labels.
If you really wanted to help artists, it would make the most sense to use whichever service is cheapest and then donate the difference to artists. But, personally I’d just go with whoever provides the best user experience, which is none of them, so I basically haven’t listened to music aside from occasional YouTube chill beats for years.
The integration with HomePod is very nice, I can just go ”Hey Siri, play Tom Waits” or whatever. Maybe that works with Spotify, I dunno, but the integration with Apple Music is obviously seamless, it just works.
I have to disagree with this. I have endless issues switching the playback between my iPhone and HomePod, sometimes I’ll have to quit the app just to get the right device to play music. When I’m playing the song on my iPhone with playback on the HomePod it sometimes ‘forgets’ the HomePod is the playback device and using the controls on the iPhone to pause the song etc do nothing forcing me to use Siri to stop playback on the HomePod. Not to mention how useless Siri is when asking to play certain things (e.g. trying to play an album that has a song with the same name on it). I generally like the HomePod but the integration (and Siri in general) are massively lacking.
I’ve had similar issues with HomePod when it comes to other apps (e.g. playing podcasts from Overcast using AirPlay), but the Apple Music integration has never been a problem, that has always just worked. Siri sometimes gets confused about what you’re asking (as with all these systems), but it’s less than I expected and at an acceptible rate for me.
Yep, until a couple years ago you had to say “Hey Siri, play Tom Waits on Spotify,” otherwise it would always try Apple Music even if you didn’t have a subscription or the app wasn’t installed. But they changed it - probably for antitrust reasons, like you said - and now it’s pretty seamless.
Music is included in Apple One Premier along with TV, News, Fitness, Arcade, and 2TB iCloud Drive. All these things integrate well within the Apple ecosystem and family sharing. One Premier is honestly one of the best value subscriptions in tech today.
However, I do think it’s anti-competitive. Spotify, for example, has absolutely no possible way to get my business until and unless my entire family were to ditch Apple.
I don’t like the Music UI but I’ve come to understand how to use it and it no longer bothers me.
My phone does that on the lock screen too, but it works it out from sampling sound, so it "integrates" with everything from someone's AppleTV to an Alexa.
It's all pro-rated. 52% of Apple Music revenues go to labels, by contract; Spotify is around the same. Royalties are just revenues divided by # of streams (simplification).
Spotify's free users give lower royalty rates per stream, and Premium users give higher ones. If Spotify users like rap more than AM users, then rap will have higher rates on Spotify than Apple Music, since a larger proportion of revenue will go to the same amount of rap songs.
If Apple Music is more painful to use than Spotify, or has worse discoverability, then people won't listen to as many songs (or won't leave it on for 8h as background noise) as with Spotify, and royalties will be higher per stream than Spotify. The higher royalties don't make up for the lower # of streams since discoverability benefits small artists.
Are you saying the table is wrong? I don't see that in your response. If the table is right, then artists are making less money per stream on Spotify. An artist might make more in absolute terms if there are more total streams on Spotify, but the artists are still being devalued and they would do better if the rates were higher. Personally, I want to use a service that values and pays artists well. ("Well" is a relative term here...)
My point is that Apple Music payouts are an identical percentage of their revenues to Spotify's; that means that any campaign to make people switch to AM will just mechanically make AM payouts decrease, and Spotify payouts increase until they converge.
Right now, Apple pays more per stream either because they may have more users in richer countries (Indian users don't pay $10/month), users who listen to less music, maybe older users (fewer students on student plans) and because they have no free tier.
So: the "AM has higher royalty payouts" is objectively a false Apple marketing point, because it's zero-sum. It's a pure accounting gimmick. Royalty payouts are pro-rata; there's no such thing as "Spotify's chosen royalty payout". For Spotify to get as high as Apple's, they'd need to make discoverability terrible (fewer hours listened per month = fewer streams = higher payouts per stream), get rid of their free tier, etc. They can't just "decide to increase payouts" because that's 52% of revenues, same as Apple Music, by contract.
lol this magnitude of royalty does not meaningfully broadly move artists into gaining a livable wage. let's expect more please. what a neoliberal idea to support specific choice of streaming platform purchase as a moral decision
Tidal has a long history of shady practices and failing to pay artists royalties. It reached a point where they were investigated by Norway for data fraud and faced class action lawsuits from labels and artists.
Ha! Thanks for this idea. When I was on Spotify I already was listening to more music anyway, because Spotify just has more music on it period. I switched to Apple Music (family reasons), but half of what I used to listen to on Spotify isn't found on Apple Music. Apple has more money than Spotify, so why do all these problems persist for years and years?
How are first party Apple apps so horrible on first party hardware? I don't use Music but I decided to check out Severance (great show) and the TV app was absolutely horrible to use in every way. The player would only stream some really low resolution on my monitor so I tried downloading the episodes and the whole app lagged so badly every time I would queue something up or delete it. It even completely stopped streaming on my monitor because for some reason it thought my HDMI cable didn't support the HDCPI thing and after I put the laptop to sleep and woke it up, it magically started working again. So many other UX problems that I just couldn't put up with and cancelled my subscription after watching the show
Like Xcode, so many of their first party apps on Mac are just badly made and awful to use
Xcode seems very YMMV. I’ve been using it day in and day out for years now and it’s seldom irritating, particularly now that dependencies can be handled with Xcode alone thanks to Swift Package Manager (Cocoapods suuuucks). On average I find Android Studio and Visual Studio (the Windows IDE, not the editor) more consistently frustrating.
Tried it, the quality was terribly inconsistency and FaceTime’s use of phone number as AppleID and not needing username/password made it much easier to use.
I think Home app tops it. Just try if you have any HomeKit enabled lights for example. I think it's some half-assed attempt at just running the iOS version on the Mac. It's just so hilariously bad - I just now tried it again and I still have no idea how do the most basic of things - change the brightness of a light. There is a slider which on iOS you would intuitively know what to do with, but on this Mac version I have no idea what the input is meant to be.
Because Music is anything but "first party" from Apple's perspective.
A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea about Apple's software, with the exception of macOS. The point of the software is to entice the customer with a complete ecosystem. Once they've sold you their laptop they've made their money. At that point, they're not that interested in putting resources towards things like Music when their hardware continues to sell quite well.
I'm not advocating for that approach, but it is what it is.
You’re re-treading an old line of argument that doesn’t make sense anymore especially in this context. Apple has identified services as an area they went to grow.
Music is an ongoing subscription service, with plenty of competition. If they want to retain or grow their paying subscribers Apple needs to improve their software with the same attention to quality they devote to hardware.
They need to improve their software to the point that the quality/price/convenience of Apple Music is more attractive than quality/price/convenience of the alternative. Since Apple Music is basically pre-installed and you get it as part of Apple One or whatever, there is a quality gap that they can accept and still grow the service. And they will, it's just basic economics.
If anybody knows of a software company that uses their excess money to make the software better instead of beefing up their balance sheet, please, hook me up. That's where I want to work.
No need to argue with a straw man, I’m not saying they should invest in software quality for altruistic or philosophical purposes.
Apple Music is a paid subscription service. Maybe they can coast on the momentum of their preinstalls and make some money, like you said.
But I’d argue, as someone who has used both apple music and Spotify in the past, that Apple is leaving money on the table by having a shoddy software component to their music service. When a superior service is equally priced and just a few taps away, they will certainly lose some percentage of paying customers.
> If they want to retain or grow their paying subscribers Apple needs to improve their software with the same attention to quality they devote to hardware.
I get your point, but no, they just need to sell more devices; act anti-competitive by bundling Apple Music on every iPhone's homescreen, thus giving Apple Music billions in free advertisement that Spotify could never get even if they paid, and by setting Apple Music as the default. Then, make it hard to switch (e.g. if you cancel Apple Music, you lose your library 90 days later). Make sure Apple Music has the home advantage by sharing advance knowledge of new APIs and hardware with the Apple Music team, but obviously not with Spotify.
Plus Apple has strong psychological advantages, since Apple users seem more likely to blindly want to stick to all-Apple solutions and default apps regardless of app quality. Compare that to Windows, where users can't wait to get rid of Edge, and Android, where only a minuscule portion of people insist on an all-Google experience.
I don't believe there's any real "corrective mechanism" inside Apple to make Apple Music or TV+ the very best, because they don't need to be.
Exactly, Apple is a hardware company with software as a loss leader.
Apple TV is pretty bad. I can't recall ever using it without a freeze or a crash. It's embarrassing for a company with the amount of money Apple has.
This is the reason why I'm bought into the Google ecosystem. I would say that Google is the least bad at software of any of the major tech companies. I would probably use Chromebooks if I could get proper drivers for my beloved RME hardware.
I am fully bought in to the Apple ecosystem, but Apple Music is the poison pill that has me questioning this new prison I have chosen.
The iOS app wastes three out of five buttons at the bottom that I can't change to something useful: "Listen Now" "Browse" "Radio" are all weak "discovery" tools that are probably more about label kickbacks than actually helping me find new music that I like.
And really, I don't need your discovery Apple - what I need is better library discovery/organization tools because I have a massive library which is unwieldy in your crap apps.
The album-centric focus is a huge PitA due to singles. Give me an Artist playlist that doesn't take up a precious playlist slot.
Maybe this isn't entirely Apple's fault, but when I see greyed out songs or albums that were once there that aren't anymore, I feel pushed to stop giving these scumbag labels my cash through your service.
I left out the bugs, but I feel that the quality of their flagship services product makes them look like a dying company, not a premium brand worth 2.5t$
It's especially horrible if you have lots of playlists, and like to add playlists from Apple Music to your library.
You can't add Apple Music playlists to playlist folders, and playlists can only be sorted alphabetically. On the Mac, your playlist folders are on top; then Apple Music playlists & your playlists are mixed together. On iPhone, it's reversed; Apple Music playlists, then your folders, forcing you to scroll all the way down to get to your playlists. And on Mac you can't add a song to a new playlist in a playlist folder directly; you need to add a song to a new playlist, and drag that playlist (that isn't highlighted) all the way up to the right folder. Yuck.
> If I choose to "like" a song, why is it not automatically saved to the so-called "library".
I like that likes and add to library are distinct as they serve two very different purposes for me, but I would really like to have a "liked" playlist.
Other annoyances (on macOS): search in apple music vs library, the search box is on one end, the scope selector is on the other. Toggling it requires re-searching. It also gets covered by the right pane. "hey I'm actually searching" feedback is terrible, many parts are ungodly slow for no reason.
Oh and that search box has awful behaviour regarding focus, click, start typing, and somehow it gets focused only a second later, missing input and/or not clearing what's in there, or restoring the previous content. It seems to have about a thousand subtle failure modes that keep getting in the way extremely annoyingly.
Sadly (personal pov/use case) Apple Music is the "best" (== less worst) app/service out there, from the mobile UI to library management, tag editor, and BYOM+streaming.
Tangent: after some time peaking and being actually good, all these music apps/streaming services have become so annoying that I'm progressively rebuilding my library (including all the non-owned discoveries I made) as flat files served by Jellyfin, which will probably take me years but ultimately I'll be able to drop the increasingly crappy app+service verticals in favour of owned music + radio for discovery (there are a couple of great curated radios around here, and a few zines made out of thin slices of dead trees)
I prefer to use the radio feature because I don't know exactly what I want to listen to and more importantly I want to learn about new artists. The fact that you can never see liked songs again is so frustrating. You can't even see a history of playback -- when you use radio. Astounding.
I wonder how Apple engineers use the application. Are they not also frustrated?
Note that when I say radio I don't mean the Radio feature of Apple Music & al but actual FM/DAB radio stations! (which may or may not be available over shoutcast/icecast)
The app performance of Apple Music on MacOS and iOS is an abomination. It's consistently twice as slow as Spotify, from loading playlists to loading search results and playing a song. I would be ashamed if I worked on the Apple Music team. How can a person with any self respect go to work every day and be okay with Apple Music in it's current state?
But it's not just an Apple problem. It feels like the vast majority of software, you can open it up and fiddle around for a few minutes and find any number of poorly conceived UX choices not to mention straight up bugs / inconsistencies. I'm not talking "I could make this software better than they did" level stuff, just things that any reasonable person would admit don't make sense.
I feel the UI at least is better than Spotify. And you don’t have to suffer from podcast advertisement with Apple Music.
In the end for all of these services you are exposed to the whims of their dev/management team. The only way around this problem is probably a regulation from the government to force services to offer a consistent unchanging api so that third party clients can be build and fix all of these problems.
Yeah iTunes used to be a real shitshow, having accumulated anything related to iPhone sync mgmt, media player, and a browser ofc. Then the Apple Music player came as an improvement, but still wtf: the workflow to play a title is like, search it, then wade through the results to get at your local copy (as opposed to titles on the store), then click it to arrive at the album where Apple Music doesn't select the damn title but the first of the album/collection, then browse through the possibly large list (have to select list view first) to locate it, then finally play it, if I recall correctly. If your music collection is large and/or on multiple volumes and/or copied from older or others systems, there are additional fuckups.
We're always making fun of that at a die-hard Apple fanboy friend of mine. To add insult to injury, Apple Music is gender-mainstreamed in German (should be a config option IMO).
But give it time; Apple is certainly able to get it right eventually. Other players have degraded as well IMHO.
> Yeah iTunes used to be a real shitshow, having accumulated anything related to iPhone sync mgmt, media player, and a browser ofc. Then the Apple Music player came as an improvement
Hmm, I'm actually glad that iTunes in its old form still lives on in Windows, because AFAIK the dedicated Podcasts app that has replaced iTunes in that regard on Macs no longer supports manually adding files as a podcast episode – something I've made heavily use of in order to get that nice listened/unlistened tracking for various radio comedy shows I've obtained through other means.
If you're an Alfred user (and I think you "should" be), try creating a web search keyword for https://music.apple.com/us/search?term={query} . When it's triggered it will open up search in the app rather than your browser. I find this much more usable than directly opening and using the app.
Great suggestion! I just added this — and it worked as expected (mostly). If the Apple Music app is in MiniPlayer mode, it will not automatically switch to the full player, but thankfully, closing the MiniPlayer immediately drops you into the search results. Thanks!
There's also Alfred's own Music feature (commonly mapped to ⌥+⌘+return), which will let you search your library and play songs without going to the Music app first.
Yes, it is Electron but Apple did use webviews in their macOS AM app as well before they switched back to native earlier this year; which still isn't that great.
Ironically, Cider works better than the Apple's web app as well; it doesn't skip or get stuck once in a while. It just works for what I need.
(In case other asks, Windows/Linux is more of a work/secondary platform, and iPhone is the main device most of the time. That's why I'd use Apple Music despite having the other platforms).
I'll second this; I've been trialing Apple Music side by side with Spotify for the last few months, and Cider has been very usable on both Linux and Windows.
This is one of my huge irritations with the “advancements” in tech. Is it too much to ask for my $1000+ 256GB device to have an mp3 experience at least as good as the one I could buy 20 years ago?! Apple Music is has slowly devolved into a worse and worse mp3 player. It’s much worse than the old ios itunes used to be, and it’s a deliberate choice they’re making.
I switched from Spotify to AM and I still wouldn’t switch back.
There’s some weird bugs for sure and the lack of switching between devices is annoying. Sometimes I’ll accidentally leave it running in my laptop and then when I’m on my phone it keeps interrupting for some reason.
Their shuffle actually shuffles, it’s not just the same 20 songs.
Artist matching is weird though. Frequently I’ll have an artist that songs attributed to them that are from a different artist with the same name. You could now check the electronic artist Danger (songs like 11:02) and see some weird new Russian rap song attributed to him as a “Single”. It’s not his song but it ends up in my NEW MUSIC MIX. I had it with artists like SIERRA and ALEX too. Incredibly annoying.
1. The playing song's time elapsed and time remaining are only displayed when you hover over the toolbar and disappear otherwise. WTF?!?
2. Sometimes when I press play, the app goes into an endless shuffle where it keeps selecting new random songs and doesn't play anything. I have to quit the app and start over.
3. The delete key stopped working in a selected song in a playlist on Monterey.
4. The Filter field doesn't appear in the window unless I press option-command-f first. Sigh.
Back when Apple Music was just introduced, I enabled the free trial on my MacBook where I already had a curated iTunes library over the years.
Apple Music was so destructive that it went and started irreversibly not only reorganising my local library but also deleting my local songs because it had the same song in the cloud… No thank you.
It was so destructive that my only option was to disable Apple Music, completely remove my whole iTunes music/data folder and restore everything from backup.
—-
I also recently realised that the Mac OS upgrade broke my iTunes playlists again, I’m not sure if it was during move to Bug Sur or earlier. I have a whole folder of music and an iTunes db file, anyone how Im supposed to import that into Music considering that iTunes is dead?
I tried switching to Apple Music from Spotify. One of my favorite features were the radio stations/shows. Elton John has one called Rocket Hour. The craziest thing to me - there was no way to favorite or bookmark those shows or track which episode you’re on. You need to navigate the labyrinth UI, drilling down to the show, or search for the show every time. Folks on the Apple Music subreddit suggested copying the “share” URL for the show, and keep that in a Notes doc.
I love Apple Music for its live radio and curator roster, but the app is shockingly poor. On an iPhone 12 Pro, every single screen shows me multiple spinners for up to a second, like every UI component is a separate webview. On MacOS, the spinners regularly persist for over a second. It's unbelievable to me that Apple execs are okay with this.
I‘ll add a comment to reflect my own experience: I’m quite happy with Apple Music, both on iOS and macOS. Sometimes I get „not authorised“ errors when playing something new and that is annoying, but other than that it just works for me as a casual user.
In comparison, Spotify has grown overly complex and feels weird in terms of UI responsiveness to me.
I find the web interface completely unusable. It's hard to pinpoint why it's terrible. It's just bad at every step of normal use, and sluggish as something slow.
I only have two problems with the ios app, but they're annoying enough. One is making you find a button to transition to a second screen to get to basic play controls, then find another button-like thing (even now I can't tell you off the top of my head where it is) to get back. I do not understand why the "play a song" interface needs multiple pages.
The other thing is that once every few hours I get the popup: "song isn't authorized" and I have to click around on shit until the app remembers that yes it actually is authorized because I pay $10 a month for it to be. I'd like to hear the UX rationale for showing a message which to 99.9% of their users just means "We're not going to play your song right now, for no particular reason except that computers don't work in general" and to the rest means "We're not going to play this song right now, even though we probably could if we were less paranoid, or better software engineers, which is an us problem but we'd rather make it a you problem"
I thought Spotify was much worse. The silent playlist song cap alone was infuriating. I constantly had issues syncing between devices. UI feedback was miserable making it so you didn’t understand whether a button was pushed due to the callbacks over cellular, not that Apple Music is much better here. The worst part of Apple Music is the distinction between Apple Music and your library. You can rate things in your library but not Apple Music - which I’m guessing is an artifact of iTunes days when you had MP3s locally. The like feature in Apple Music is also terrible compared to Spotify
I've borrowed hundreds of CD from the different public-city-libraries I've been the past 15 years. In France you're allowed to make private copy of books and CDs :)
There's no way any public library near me has more than 10% of what I listen to currently. They have famous bands and mainstream albums from my country and that's it. I hate most of it.
Really? We have Privatkopie, and last I checked CD Audio was not considered copy protection. You (indirectly, via the manufacturer) already pay a fee to GEMA for every device or data storage media that can be used to make them with the assumption you will. Do it.
Unless you thought libraries were a euphemism for torrents.
> Das Gesetz trat am 1. Januar 2008 in Kraft.[7] § 53 Abs. 1 S. 1 UrhG wurde geändert, so dass Privatkopien nicht zulässig sind, sofern zur Vervielfältigung „eine offensichtlich rechtswidrig hergestellte oder öffentlich zugänglich gemachte Vorlage“ verwendet wird.
the last sentence says that no public sharing is allowed for copyrighted works
doesn’t matter if the distributor is a library or a torrent
Did you get local network streaming to work well? Player takes over one second to respond when I try to control the streaming from my phone. Works perfectly except for this high latency issue.
Yeah that's one of the issue, but I'm living with it.
It's pretty awesome to have a stream of all my music on a unique link available on the Internet :)
Second that, Snapcast is great and the multi room feature is magical. Every friend that comes over lets out a wow when they hear the music synchronized in the kitchen, living room and patio at the same time.
I also created a free app to control Snapcast with macOS keyboard shortcuts or from your iPhone/iPad: https://lowtechguys.com/volum
Maybe it’s just because I enjoy obscure music, but I find a fair number of older tracks are seemingly corrupted on Apples servers. I run into music pretty regularly that’ll get part way into a song and just fail. Sometimes it will skip to the next song, sometimes it will get stuck and I have to manually advance it. Sometimes I get the treat of horrible static/screeching.
I have this problem across Mac laptop and android phone.
I’ve had Apple Music convert saved songs from explicit to censored in the past. The software must be written so poorly.
Another good one:
If you start a station on macOS. You can’t hit previous song to go back.
If you’re on iOS you can…
Apple Music is pretty terrible. So many times there’s no UI feedback when pressing things and they just glitch into some new state seconds after pressing things
> I’ve had Apple Music convert saved songs from explicit to censored in the past. The software must be written so poorly.
This happens with YouTube Music as well and it is incredibly annoying. So weird how this same kind of thing would happen with multiple services.
For me it's been mostly Aesop Rock and Big KRIT albums that frequently change from Explicit -> Censored versions, but it's happened with other artists as well.
I’m not saying it’s the best app I use, but I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading this thread. I’ve used Apple Music since it launched and I haven’t had an issue since the first few releases.
I’m also a very happy user (and a Spotify expat). Apple Music already has about half of Spotify’s market share and its growth is accelerating. I feel like this is an “Apple Maps”-type situation, where it’s slagged on for years while Apple continues to quietly improve it.
If you sync your library, it will wipe all your custom likes/dislikes for songs you sync manually via iTunes as well as wipe your smart playlists (blank them - until you sync your device to your computer again)
Therefore Apple Music is literally unusable if you have a large library of songs not on iTunes (like indie electronic stuff) and don’t want iTunes to identify them and switch them to Apple Music songs.
The desktop app is abysmal and slow, I like how they pay artists a little more and it’s a little cheaper bundled with other services, and that’s the only reason I use it.
The usability sucks too. How in god’s name do you make an app in 2022 that has unclickable artist and album names sprinkled throughout? It’s incredible how terrible iTunes was and how long Apple is allowing it to drag everything down.
I still appreciate having a 'library' unlike the author, but I remain absolutely gobsmacked at how Apple buries the switch that toggles between searching Apple Music and my library. On mobile, the toggle is always right next to the search box. It gets buried in a previous page of what seems like a web view on the desktop. Some of the worst UX I have ever seen!
I just don't understand why Apple Music search is so bad. Sometimes only exact match returns albums. It's so bad that appending "Apple Music" in google works better.
I tried out Apple Music for the first time because I got a trial for it. I was shocked with how slow and unresponsive the interface is. Not only that songs had a noticeable delay between when they were clicked and when they actually started playing
To be fair, Spotify is doing something pretty magical here. I can’t figure out how they usually start tracks playing within what feels like microseconds after I choose them.
Pre caching? Yes but sometimes I don’t see how it could have reasonably guessed that I might play that particular song, like when I start typing to search and then stab at an entry in the results.
Surely they also want to be doing some buffering, so if they are pre caching a tiny bit of songs then they need to load the next piece of data quickly before I’ve heard the first part, but there is no obvious issue where this fails, as I might expect to hear.
Also when I seek in a song it’s almost always instant. They have the whole song quickly enough for the whole thing to be seekable?
If they were just relying on great latency and bandwidth then there should be a lot more issues with the audio pausing or dropping out.
I changed countries on the apple store and in transition I lost my entire apple music library which I curated for over 6 years (thousands of songs). All vanished. It was so painful.
I have moved to spotify but I am still overcoming the grief :(
The one good feature Apple Music has is the "export" feature. Spotify makes it a pain, Apple just lets you make an archive of your whole library instantly.
Sorry about your old library. Don't trust Spotify either! You can download a listing on your account page.
Be careful if you ever get a suspicious billing email.
Apple decided my credit card expired (it didn’t).
Unlike other services, if you stop paying, it deletes your entire library (including playlists) from all your devices. So if you want to switch to another music service, you’re hosed.
I’ve been fighting for a week or so now to get my playlist data via the privacy tools. Just yesterday they decided to give me a list of all my app downloads, instead of what I asked for.
Apple wants me to pay to get back access, but I’m not willing to give their services division another $0.01 until they stop treating customers like shit.
I've had apple music full-on kernel panic & restart my m1 macbook air, I've had it crash finder & do all sorts of crazy render ghosting stuff on screen like duplicating app icons, I've had it make the OS forget my login keychain key so every app/agent/process pops up a dialog asking for it until I reboot, not to mention the airplay bugs. I've used iTunes since I first got a mac about 15 years ago so I'm not keen to change but Music on MacOS is an absolute carcrash
I cancelled my subscription after the player regularly stopped emitting sound - the player would show it's playing a song and increment the progress bar but no sound was coming out. I have never had the same problem with any other player. Oh and sometimes any song would just keep buffering until I restarted the app.
As far as the slowness goes, I attribute that to the fact that the app is not native, it's just some sort of Electron-like mess. Then again so is Spotify (I think?) and it feels much snappier.
They did, but the new native views are quite buggy, so while it uses less memory, the user experience improvement was minimal.
Apple should really stop shipping such buggy softwares.
Yep, one of the most frustrating experiences. What makes it worse is how hard it can be to navigate back to what I was listening to when the music stopped.
Apple Music software on Mac is truly horrible, and I remember how bad iTunes used to be. It's the slowest UI I use (besides some Windows things), and it routinely goes catatonic if you
toggle a vpn or switch networks, etc. adding some things:
* the bar for scrubbing is what, 2 pixels wide?
* airplay is broken. it does. not. work. It takes about 5 iterations of pausing, restarting things, and prayer to get it to play through its speakers and a homepod. And god forbid you then pause it for a couple minutes or want to hear something from the browser for a second.
* If you want to mirror to an appletv and hear sound... good luck, be sure to designate a beneficiary before embarking because you'll probably want to kill yourself.
These aren't complicated things to identify or describe. They aren't edge cases. It's the basic functionality and it is absolute shit. How can anything get this bad? Do apple employees not listen to music? Is each feature made by a different siloed team? It doesn't take a silicon valley visionary to fix these things, but they are clearly missing something in their org
I suspect one reason the browsing and search experience is so slow and horrible on these services is that they don't want to present straightforward lists that would allow people to scrape their catalogs and put them head to head. Mainstream tech reviewers seem to have extremely mainstream tastes and insist that you won't notice the difference between the catalogs of YouTube Music (the smallest major service with about 60 million songs) and Apple Music (the largest with about 90 million). Even I noticed YouTube was missing a bunch of my favorite albums and I don't think any of my favorites could be called "obscure" unless you have a really liberal definition of that word. It would be interesting to see a list of the most popular artists missing from each service, or a venn diagram of record labels and rights groups, but I haven't found anything more detailed than isolated anecdotes and media coverage of individual artists trying to push Tidal and/or getting mad at Spotify.
Watching Netflix with Safari, and then going to the Apple Music local library ("Recently Added", then click on an album) literally broke Music. It looked like this[0], all the Music toolbar buttons were gone, and keyboard shortcuts (spacebar to play) no longer worked. Pausing the movie and switching Safari tab to non-Netflix was the only solution. This was still the case on a completely clean install with only Music and Safari launched. I guess it had to do with the DRM Safari uses to play Netflix content messing with the Music app.
But did Apple really never test watching a movie and listening to music at the same time, with the built-in apps? That bug survived from early Big Sur to at least the Monterey release candidate, again on a completely clean install (I didn't test it again afterwards). Huh? How?
> Hitting play will start the music at some sound level, after about a second or two the sound level is suddenly reduced (and stays at that level until hitting pause and play again).
This is likely due to "Sound Check" being enabled (I think it's on by default), which you can un-check in the "Playback" section of the Music app's preferences.
I had a bunch of random stability issues with Music, they mostly went away when I deleted and reinstalled the App. Still not what I would expect out of Apple for one of their main apps.
About half the time when I use it on the desktop I have to force quit Music. I have no idea how a non-technical person would use something so buggy.
Regarding the second point: I believe this is "sound check" a setting that normalizes audio volume between different songs. I think it takes a second to kick in (maybe it has to fill up some audio buffer to work?) and yes it's incredibly annoying. Afaik only solution is to disable sound check
I've always been an AM user but I can't stand the poor performance and issues anymore. I switched to Spotify again 3 months ago and amazingly they still have my 7-8 year old collaboration playlist with my wife. But Apple Music on the other end just removed my playlists that are barely a year old.
What makes this frustrating for me is that the underlying Apple Music API is actually quite robust, such that it really is quite straightforward to create an Apple Music client that is extremely performant. I just can't wrap my head around why Apple can't do it themselves.
The UX I enjoy most is buying a vinyl record, listening to it start to finish while reading the full liner notes, knowing that the artist got the maximum amount of money, and there being no way for any tech company to track how many times I listened. Highly recommended!
Spotify is the worst and buggiest software I use, both the app and the web app. How bad could it be? It resets to the beginning of a multi hour podcast randomly with no way to get back to where I was. It does many other unbelievable things. God damn the Spotify player.
I wanted to switch from Spotify to Apple Music, for reasons why see [1].
While I enjoyed that most of the music I am listening to is available on Apple Music as well, I just could not make the switch because of the bad UX in some places and their recommendation system, which is barely existing and one of the features I enjoy most with cloud streaming services.
With Apple TV I had similar experiences - compared to Netflix, the UX was just horrible. In a way it made me feel good - if a company with so much money as Apple can fail so miserably, it is fine if I as a developer make mistakes too sometimes :)
Can confirm. Sometimes there are full DAYS where there is some error and it will not play music at all… I’m paying for it and it won’t play anything. I’ve submitted big reports multiple times. It’s not good enough.
The desktop client is really buggy and reflects poorly on Apple. Some say, an all-you-can-eat buffet of a big chunk of all published music is just too good to be true and can't last. But, then wasn't that the promise? Too cheap to meter? To have at your fingertips the accumulated product of hundreds of years of culture, millions of hours of practice...
Currently streaming: JS Bach, Sonatas for Viola da Gamba, Sergei Istomin and Viviana Sofronitsky which I had to type 'cause you can't even cut-n-paste out that piece of junk.
I hate that in order to add a song to a playlist I have to add it to my library so that it is mixed in and listed alongside the full albums I’ve purchased. I guess I prefer using Spotify so that my library of purchased music and playlists for streaming are altogether separate.
Also on the desktop app the way to find new jazz releases is to first put the curser in the search input which opens a secret menu. Is there a way for me to “favorite” new jazz releases so that I can check it each week without so much scrolling and clicking?
What amazes me about Apple is that they have hardware and operating system that are really great. Every other software I have used that is made by them is buggy beyond belief. Have you tried Apple TV. I stopped using it not because of lack of content but was so unreliable to the extent that you feel like it says “fuck you”. You have one packet loss, your download is doomed. Starting is takes multiple seconds. Try to search something, the UI will freeze. I love Apple products and I hope they fix their services.
Don’t think so. Almost every third party app does downloading right except Apple’s. It’s like they don’t even try to recover at all. You can’t resume updates - only on Apple related software. I remember spending 5 days trying to update to Mojave because the update kept failing.
It also has a horrible UI. Honestly iTunes had its issues but Music is a step backwards compared to iTunes!!
It's UI is clearly designed by someone who 1) only listens to recent popular music, 2) isn't particularly passionate about any music they listen to, and 3) don't bother to look for new music that isn't in the top-10. Basically the last kind of person who should ever do UI design - no passion or knowledge about the application or the market!
Agree. I never managed to sync playlists between my iPhone and iPad.
The only way to make it work turned out to be:
1. Delete all playlists
2. Buy a MacBook
3. In the music.app, re-create the playlists.
4. Then, sync your iPhone’s music library including the just created playlists with the MacBook.
Took me a while to figure this out
I even started using Spotify just because at least syncing playlists would just work in that app.
I have to agree it’s buggy but awesome too. Very good value for my family plan, excellent sound quality. Every artist obviously. Makes me wish I had never spent so much time pirating in my youth.
The Siri integration is quite bad. Sometimes songs only half play. Needs a restart about every day. Yep it’s buggy, but I’m a Apple music subscriber for life. They nailed it.
> Makes me wish I had never spent so much time pirating in my youth.
Listen, I feel your pain, but don't feel bad about this. Streaming services didn't exist back then. The best we could do was have some reasonably-sized collection on purchased CDs that we ripped to MP3, supplemented by a digital collection acquired through ... different means.
It took the (recording) industry years before they woke up. That's not your fault.
Thinking back, I could even imagine an alternate late 90s / early 2000s, where the RIAA was tolerant of the streaming model, but most peoples' connections were still dial-up / weak broadband, so we'd all be content with ~64kbps-quality MP3 playback lol
We just cancelled it yesterday for many of the same reasons. Apple needs to get a small team to rip through the design work and build something incredible.
Listening to music has become less fun and the experience objectively worse, even as the catalog of available titles has grown to include everything. It’s not as delightful an experience as it once was.
> Like programmers weave a magic wand around and bugs magically fix themselves. Why can't you make navigation fast?
While it's true that these are hard things to do, I think the author may be getting at a deeper issue here. For some reason the software world of today thinks delivering more crappy half baked features is more important than making usable bug free features, or even just fixing what already exists. I don't know where this idea came from, but it's a very annoying ideology.
The Unity game engine is another big corporation that does this. They released that demo awhile ago showing off how they can create realistic looking game scenes (the chess scene demo). I don't understand why they think that appeals to anyone. I'm pretty sure like 90% of people use Unity to make 2D games or low poly 3D games. And instead of fixing all their broken "features" they continue adding "features" nobody cares about or asked for.
The worst thing about Apple Music on macOS are the "smart" playlists. They can't be disabled, they keep coming back no matter how many times I delete them, and they're always at the top, so they push my playlists out of sight. Just absolutely terrible UX.
I only use the offline version of Apple Music to manage my local music library, it does the job, but there was a major quality downgrade when Big Sur came out (there was a re-write that replaced the software with a much inferior version for no reason).
Yeah agree - I used Spotify back in the day, then Google Play Music, then Apple Music when HomePods first came out. It’s just simple, works well, has the awesome lyrics function and has good quality human curated content.
I used to use Apple Music and liked it, but the bitrate (music quality) of the music was too low so after a few years I cancelled it. For me it's really audible the difference between 320kbps music.
Please, no! I often purchase a song I streamed because I liked it and want to have it even if the streaming service goes away or loses its license to stream that song or album!
I have filed so many radars against Music.app and they’ve never been fixed over the years. IMO, It’s gotten significantly worse since iTunes got broken apart in Catalina.
I just want to sync my music library on my hard drive to my iphone. All I want is a UI on iOS that doesn’t force my classical music into an album view.
I don't think you are. My knowledge may be outdated but Spotify uses a lower bitrate than Apple Music (which can go up to lossless) and the Airpods supports that lossless, too.
This happens on my ipad, mac, android phone.
It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it.
Apart from that, why the hell is the title and artist only shown in one line that starts scolling instead of showing multiple lines if it doesn't fit, at least in the album view and the player. It's such a pain listening to classical music when the composer and the performer and section are not visible without playing it and waiting for the line to scroll, like wtf.