Apple Music, A Collection of Complaints

This post comes from a deep dissatisfaction with the shuttering of Rdio and a deeper dissatisfaction with the streaming music options left in its wake. Just opinions of someone who can kindly be described as a control freak.

The Interface

• It’s strange to have Playlist as a top-level tab along with My Music, New, Radio, etc. especially since you can view your music library in the Playlists section using the exact same views that you have in My Music. Why not just consolidate that into one window with a show/hide playlists sidebar?
• Adding music to my library should be one-click, not a long drawn out process of drilling down into an album. Making use of the right-click menus could make this a lot easier. The right-click menus in general are not consistent across different screens and that’s disarming even 6+ months later.
• Why is the search divided between My Music and Apple Music? Seems like it could be unified and just stacked to lead with My Music? Also, this is a usability complaint for me personally, but when I type something into the search field, why do I have to arrow down to the “search apple music” option and press enter?

The Library

• By far the biggest complaint for me personally about the library is that it doesn’t show full release dates of all music! I know that most people aren’t as curatorial as me, but I really like knowing at least the month something was released. All of this info is in the iTunes Store; why is this not displayed in Apple Music?!
• Let me add a song to a playlist without it being added to my music library. Sometimes I want a song on a playlist, but I don’t want it added to my library.
• Newly-released songs on albums already in your library. This has to be a bug because I can’t imagine anyone wanting it to work this way. So, Apple Music prefers to stack pre-release singles into the album and just makes all the other tracks unavailable. But you can still add the whole album to your library, and I assume the thought process is that when the album is released, those unavailable tracks just light up and become available. For me, instead of just appearing, I have to remove the ‘unavailable’ versions and then re-added from Apple Music before they become accessible.

The Queue

I know that Rdio spent a ton of time refining their queue and it was quite honestly one of my favorite features about the service. That said, no other service does anything even remotely as good. So, here’s a laundry list of features I would love to have added back into it.

• When you switch between music and radio stations, please don’t clear out my queue of songs that I really did want to listen to. At least when I try to play music that’s not in the queue, it will warn me and give me the option of clearing or saving the queue. No such luck with radio.
• Give the queue structure some more love. Let me add a whole album as one item and let me stack things like songs and albums as separate items to play instead of just having all the songs of an album added. This is insanely hard to manage in the small queue window, which leads to…
• Break the queue out of its flyover window! It’s so small and does nothing to highlight all the content you may have thrown in there. Rdio and Spotify both have dedicated full-screen experiences for their queue and it made everything feel much more controlled and interactive.
• Why doesn’t the play queue sync between desktop and mobile? This seems like a no brainer with things like continuity being so heavily touted.
• This last complaint is a bug that seems to have become less pronounced since I initially wrote this list, but I still occasionally have issues with my queue shuffling and dropping songs as it switches between My Music and Apple Music content. This can become very frustrating to go through a bunch of blogs and queue up 20 songs and only get to listen to 7 of them as the queue sheds them left and right. I shouldn’t have to add the music to my library before I’ve even heard it just to guarantee I’ll get to listen to it.

New

• The New Releases sections are a hodge-podge of things that are actually new and things that are popular but came out a while ago. Give me a New Releases section that actually contains only new releases. I want to know what came out this week, not what came out a month ago and is still popular. Additionally, don’t just feature the top 45-ish albums that came out, show me everything! Some of my best discoveries were just wading through everything that caught my eye, but wasn’t quite popular enough to float to the top. Nowadays, I jump on Spotify and surf through their New Music Friday playlist every Friday and drop the good stuff into Apple Music.
• Alert me when new releases from artists in my library are released.
• I repeat, alert me when new releases from artists in my library are released. I think that Apple probably banked very hard on artists hitting the ground running with Connect, but they really should have realized that not only are there going to be issues with a new service, but also that adoption takes time. Sure, they have some big celebrity acts on there doing their thing, but it’s definitely not everyone, and it’s definitely not comprehensive enough to suffice for what other streaming services have done for years. If I’m following an artist, I should get a notification when their next new single comes out. Letting me know about music by people I already listen to is just going to make me buy in even more to the Apple Music ecosystem. As it stands now, I had to migrate all my Rdio content not only to Apple Music, but also to Spotify so that I could at least keep up with the artists I wanted to follow. Making sure that I have artist following parity on both services is taxing and makes me resent Apple Music for this egregious oversight.

For You

• Nothing in my For You section is really all that new or exciting. Beyond the first week or two of using Apple Music, I almost never use this section. The service should be able to tell what’s in my library, look at my play counts, look at my heart and star ratings, and figure out what I might like. Spotify is actually amazing at this with their Discover Weekly playlists, which update weekly based on your plays there.

Radio and Curated Content

• Radio stations are almost universally terrible in my experience. See the above points on For You about how they could be made much better.
• Apple is trying to position themselves as curators of taste and excellence, but they’re still lightyears behind what Spotify is doing. I’m generally an Rdio fanboy through and through, but Spotify is the king of curation, no contest. Their genre- and mood-specific playlists almost always land on the excellent side of spot-on, and the New Music Friday and Discover Weekly playlists could comfortably keep a casual music listener satisfied for life.

Obviously, none of these complaints have stopped me from using Apple Music or convinced me to change over to Spotify, which I have come to use almost in tandem with Apple Music. There are many things I really like about Apple Music, such as nested playlist folders, smart playlists, star and heart ratings (which make smart playlists incredibly powerful), and deep integration with the Apple ecosystem.

But there are also some glaring issues that keep me consistently dissatisfied with the overall experience. Obviously, I’m not going anywhere right now, but I’m definitely one of the people who are noticing a visible trend in Apple shipping software that no longer ‘just works’. I’m just a consumer who is starting to wonder if the premium prices I pay are really giving me the premium experience I expected.