I am a huge music fan, and always have been.
I remember listening to my parents’ Beatles, Elton John and Rolling Stones records as a kid growing up in the early 80s, and buying cassette tapes of Billy Idol and the Beastie Boys on a school trip to London, England in 1987.
I have had headphones glued to my head since getting my hands on a Sony Walkman. My walkman, my tapes, and eventually CDs were my prized possession; I used to travel around with two Case Logic binders holding 100 CDs each, keeping my music collection close to me long before getting my first iPod, a 60Gb iPod video.
Today my music library takes around 300Gb of space on my home server, and I use iTunes Match to keep a good portion of it at my fingertips. I pretty much only use my phone to listen to music, and I listen to a lot of it.
The music app is probably the app I use the most every day, next to the Mail app and Safari, so it needs to be awesome. I especially care about navigation because I have so much content to this lb through. The pre-iOS 8.4 music app was pretty usable although I was not a big fan of how it handled browsing and playing albums for a given artist, or how you accessed the full-screen ‘now playing’ view.
I’ve also tried a handful of popular alternative music player apps and found that none of them were killer. To be fair to those apps, each of them add something cool and unique, but the overall experience was not was I was looking for.
I was looking forward to the music app update due to release with iOS 8.4, hoping to see some of the cool features I experienced with other apps, and I have to say you did you homework and delivered a couple of good features. It’s now much easier to get to the full-screen view of what is ‘now playing’ and the mini player bar gives you quick way to see what’s playing and start or pause playback.
What I did not expect however is how browsing your library has become so awkward and difficult. I totally get the idea of the all-in-one music app (giving you access to your library, the streaming service, Beats 1 radio and Connect), but the implementation is just not good and the user experience is terrible.
It’s clear that your focus has shifted from giving users a great way to play content they own to trying to compete with Spotify in the streaming business. Like others have said that ‘s a business decision that so far doesn’t seem to take the kind of user experience you are famous for into consideration. As someone who plays mostly music from my personal library I feel alienated and left behind.
But I have to tell you that feeling of alienation is bitter sweet. Somebody once told me “with chaos comes opportunity” and I have been waiting and preparing patiently for the time when opportunity comes knocking at my door. It turns out I have been working on my own music app for the past few months in an attempt to create something that would work great for me, and continue to learn the ins-and-outs of iOS development. At first I did not see the product I was building as a clearly differentiated market winner because the space is crowded and I didn’t have a clear idea of who the customer would be. All that has changed since Apple Music launched at the end of June 2015.
Jam On is for all iPhone and iPod Touch users who love music, have a digital music collection years in the making and want a great way to discover music and a great alternative to what Apple’s new music app dishes out. Get Jam On from the app store, visit the website, and see some cool images of the app here.
So thank you Apple Music, perfect timing!
