Apple Music is not worthy of the Apple brand

1 Jul 2015 16:53 | apple

I wanted to like Apple Music, I really really did. I never really got into Spotify but the hassle of finding new music is a constant problem for me. As you can see from my music page on this very website, I go through music at a crazy rate. I’ve bought over 1500 songs from iTunes over the last few years and only around 266 are still in my playlist. Finding new music that I like is a constant struggle and I generally resort to scraping sites like beatport.com, phonica, blackmarket records etc looking for new stuff.

So today I tried the Apple Music free trial.

The first page was a load of bubbles with the names of musical genres in them. You are apparently supposed to tap the ones you like, and double-tap the ones you love. Straight away there was a glaring problem - none of the genres were the music I actually listen to. 99% of my collection is D&B and dubstep. The closest approximations were “dance” or “electronic”, but I didn’t really fancy my chances much with those kind of vague categories.

But it gets worse..

In order to remove genres, as you’re apparently supposed to do, you have to hold your finger on them for 3 whole seconds WHILE THE FUCKING THING MOVES AROUND UNDERNEATH IT! Is Apple making some kind of very poor-taste joke?!

Finally, I managed to select both “dance” and “electronic”, disregard the rest, and move to the next section. Then I was presented with another set of bubbles for 20 artists I’ve never heard of. Why it was presenting these instead of, oh I don’t know, the artists I’ve ACTUALLY BOUGHT MUSIC FROM, I have no idea.

After rejecting all of these I got another 20 artists that I barely care about. The only two I even vaguely like were Prodigy and Nero. After selecting these two and killing the rest, I then found that there were no more artists and the next button wouldn’t do anything. There was no obvious indication why (nice one Apple!) but presumably I hadn’t selected enough artists that I don’t like in order to continue.

At this point I decided fuck Apple Music in the teeth and wiped it from my devices. Why they would push artists you don’t like or don’t know on you when they have your ENTIRE MUSIC COLLECTION in their cloud is very strange. Why should I have to select any artists at all? They KNOW which artists I like because I BOUGHT THEIR FUCKING MUSIC!

Perhaps they couldn’t get those artists, the artists I actually like, to sign up to the service. In which case they should be smart enough to tell me upfront “Hey Mark, we don’t have any of the artists you like in Apple Music at the moment, still want to continue?”

If they’d done that, and not rolled out an absolutely ridiculous UI, I’d just be mildly disappointed rather than actually angry.

Apple Music is not worthy of the Apple brand.