One Week On, Apple Music Skips A Beat


Apple Music

The writing is on the wall. Music streaming is the future. Earlier this year, streaming music revenues didn’t just reach parity but overtook physical sales of CDs. In a market where even retro formats like vinyl are making a resurgence and are now being charted due to rising popularity, CD sales revenues fell 12.7% and digital downloads too showed signs of slowdowns while streaming revenues jumped up 29%. The streaming business has simply become too lucrative for anyone to ignore if they’re even vaguely involved with the music industry. With Apple Music, Cupertino enters the fray and is no doubt about to give stiff competition in a bid to wrestle away a significant share of the pie. Is it good enough to convince you to switch away from Spotify/Rdio/Gaana/Wynk or any other music streaming service you might be on? That’s what I set out to try and figure out.

Apple MusicThe top two factors that make or break a music streaming service are UX (User Experience) and the music library. The latter is mostly the same across the board with some notable exceptions based on specific markets. We’ll talk about that shortly. The user experience and the user interface on the other hand are factors that can easily skew users towards or away from a specific service.

Apple Music vs Competition

Let’s compare Apple Music to the legendary iPod. Like the music player that changed the music industry forever, parallels can be drawn with Apple Music as well. Where they differ is that the iPod was competing against devices that had a poor and clunky experience and no easy way to buy music. Apple Music on the other hand enters an industry teeming with quality competition that offers practically the same library and in a surprising twist, an arguably better interface too.

Launch Apple Music and you are thrown towards a page that draws your attention and convinces you to sign up for ‘3 months of free music’. Very enticing indeed. What is less enticing is that it is a needlessly convoluted process to cancel the automatic subscription renewal and more than a few people will end up getting charged for the service even if they don’t wish to continue come October.

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Next up is a feature that is unique to Apple yet doesn’t really feel like anything that they’ve done before. Bright pink bubbles that feel like something straight out of a kindergarten nightmare fill up your screen. You are now expected to tap and double tap your favorite genres, artists and cancel out anything you don’t like. The issue here is that none of the UI interactions are very apparent. Apple’s famous interface paradigms wherein even a first time user of a computer doesn’t require a manual certainly doesn’t apply here. While the bubble selections might help Apple generate relevant playlists for users right at first launch, we much prefer the design choice made by most other streaming services to get users to the music first and then mine their listening habits for relevant content.

So after all the time you spend on feeding Apple Music data about your eclectic music tastes and all the obscure bands that you listen to, you’d imagine that you’ll get to relax and get your mind blow by some great music. Nope. You get thrown into this.

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All those fantastic playlists, suggestions by Apple’s army of human curators and algorithm based tastemakers that were promised are nowhere to be found. After all that effort, you reach a landing page of recent albums that have absolutely no relevance at all to your selection. It is nice that Apple wants to introduce me to fresh music but given all the hullabaloo over human curation and genre targeted music, the very least that Apple could do would be to create a landing page of fresh music tailored to my tastes.

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Take a deep breath and move on to the For You section. Ah, so this is where the magic lies. There’s a veritable treasure trove of gems to be discovered amidst the number of quality playlists generated. Okay, Apple Music is certainly not going to help you discover the next Drudkh or a band like If Trees Could Talk but it does a decent enough job of selecting good tracks from a varied selection of mainstream bands from within the confines of the genres you selected. That is till it throws a spanner in the wheels and things come to a proverbial hault. Spot that great playlist of ghazals amidst a heavy metal jukebox and Ronnie James Dio‘s seminal album?  I don’t listen to ghazals, I never have. They just aren’t to my taste and i would certainly not expect Apple to throw a doozy like that. The above screenshot shows just one such instance but the subscription music service has offered everything from the BeeGees to Frank Sinatra despite being instructed to restrict its selection to rock and metal. While i certainly don’t mind Sinatra crooning Fly Me To The Moon and appreciate Apple’s efforts to give me a more sophisticated taste in music, it also highlights a gap in the service. A gap that lies at the very core of the promise that Apple makes. Perhaps it’ll get better with time? We can only hope.

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One of the last to embrace the future, the teething troubles show that Apple is still figuring things out and I’d be inclined to say that it is quite forgivable. What is harder to understand are the gaps in the library. There’s been a lot of hype around Top 40 artists with mainstream appeal like Taylor Swift making their music available on the service. Scratch below the surface though and you’ll spot misplaced artwork, missing tracks and entire albums missing altogether from artist pages. This despite the fact that the same albums are available on competing services like Spotify. The promise of streaming practically any track out there remains just that, a promise. To their credit, Apple bundles in the iTunes Match service within the Apple Music subscription plan so you can upload any tracks missing from the service into a cloud locker. At launch, this is limited to 25,000 tracks but it’ll be bumped up to 100,000 very soon. The difference between iTunes Match and matching via Apple Music is that tracks downloaded from the former are DRM-free while any music matched or uploaded through Apple Music will be tainted by the scourge of DRM.

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With the convenience of having millions of tracks available just a click away, it can get hard to find fresh music to listen to. A plight faced by many, you tend to get stuck in the rut of listening to the same music and even playlists aren’t really a solution for that matter. Fret not because as always, Apple has your back. Enter Beats 1. A fresh internet radio (remember those?) service that brings on-board an all star DJ line up is here to point you to the music you should be listening. As DJ Zane Lowe of BBC 1 fame makes it abundantly clear, Beats 1 is live worldwide though not quite as it appears that shows are repeated every 12 hours. Popular artists like Dr. Dre and Run The Jewels are also hosting shows on the service which should serve as a nice break from the monotony of straight up algorithmic radio streams. Quality has so far been somewhat hit or miss, both in terms of stream reliability and also the music selection though it is certainly not bad. While I was quite interested and intrigued by Beats 1 having been a fan of Zane Lowe‘s show on BBC 1 as a teenager, i don’t think it can be considered a huge draw for prospective users. Indeed, between the multiple accounts we’ve set up in our household, collectively we’re yet to spend even an hour on the radio service. This of course remains very subjective.

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Back to the interface then, unlike most of the competition, the slow as molasses interface proves to be quite counter intuitive. That iTunes is bloated has been known for ages now but the addition of Apple Music has really bogged down the application. Your best bet is to make heavy use of the search field. A unified search box is present but search results are bifurcated between local music and cloud based music. By default a song name will bring you to directly to local music and if you wish to search for similarly titled for music on Apple Music, you’ll have to click that tab in the search box. There’s just too many clicks involved and less technically inclined users might well be put off by the effort involved and the learning curve here.

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The overall vibe you get from Apple Music is of a public beta. At times it felt as if Cupertino pushed this out the door just because they were on a deadline. It is unlike Apple to reveal an unpolished product but this is exactly what it is. Call it a sign of the times but that is what we saw with the Apple Watch as well. As the app is being baked in to the music application for everyone on the latest version of iOS, getting traction for the company is not in question. I have faith in the company that it will fix and moreover improve the UI idiosyncrasies here but till then i’m heading back to my combination of Spotify, Pandora and local music that together offer exactly what i need.

 

 

 


Author: Dhruv Bhutani

Your friendly neighborhood techie. Currently using a Pixel 2 XL. Catch him on Twitter (@DhruvBhutani) / Facebook .