I’ve been thinking about writing a review on Apple music for a while because there are so many things about it that bug me. I figured I would give it a little longer before writing a full review and see if Apple updated the interface in the meantime.
Okay so they didn’t update the interface so here are my thoughts on it. I’ll start by saying that before moving to Apple Music, like most people, I was a Spotify user. I’ve used iTunes for years and have over 100gb of music updated with iTunes match so when Apple said they were coming out with a Spotify competitor I was pretty happy as I could once again have all my music in one place.
I like Apple Music, it has just about every record you can imagine but I find myself listening to the same 4 albums each month. Is this Apple’s fault? I’d say yes because of their lack of playlists and poor selection on ‘For you’ leave you listening to the same thing. One of the best things about Spotify was the playlists, the endless playlists, each day I could pick a new playlist and I would rarely hear the same records more than twice. Maybe Apple Music has more playlists but I’ve have looked and can’t find anymore than 20 for Singer/Songwriter genre. I’ve now got into the habit of going to ‘New’, selecting the singer songwriter genre and then going for hot tracks. This works pretty well but when you listen to music throughout the working day you soon end up listing the the same record over and over (currently listing to Rising Water for the 1000th time today).
For a company hell bent on excellent design how did they get the interface for Apple Music so wrong. There isn’t anything intuitive about any of it. iTunes on its own is great, so why can’t they keep it more inline or create a flow to finding new music. Why when you go to a genre do you have to go in another loop to select playlists for that genre. I also can’t understand why they can’t just incorporate the ‘For You’ and ‘New’ sections together, ‘New’ just seems to be aimed at teenage girls and rappers, so can’t we have an algorithm that better detects your music preferences and give you some playlists based on your preference.
The ‘For You’ section is just a waste of space, it just recommends music you already have and then just recirculates it after a few weeks. How many times do I need to have Sia Collaborations or Ed Sheeran as a suggestion. Again if they can put ‘For You’ and ‘New’ in one section together it would leave space for a new section. Maybe call this section Discover, where you can find new artists based on your preferences.
Other small bits that irritate me, the current song info at the top, why can’t you just click the artist name or album to then go to the entire alumn of artist. Instead you have to click the tiny three dots and then go through two menus to simply go to the artist’s page.