Apple Music From a Geek’s Perspective
As you may not know them
I’ve lived with this app for the last couple of years. Whether it was a web app through which I played music on windows workstations or Linux stations. Or a native app on a MacBook or Mini, as well as iPhones. Apple Music offers a great selection of music, nowadays with adequate quality, but from my point of view, it has a couple of big BUTs.
Suppose you are deeply rooted in the Apple ecosystem. In that case, you have no choice but to get a subscription to this service, as otherwise, your HomePod, iPad, Apple Watch, iPhone, or Mac will be deprived of the continuity this service offers. So let’s see what I like about this app and what I don’t.
Continuity
Because of the ease of use and switching between devices, including the ease of playing music on the HomePod by pointing your phone at the HomePod in the space. These are just things you’ll love.
But not all playlists between devices are synced, and you can pick up where you left off elsewhere on each device. This is one of those things you’ll love, although I don’t think it’s anything groundbreaking in 2022, and other streaming services will be able to do it too.
Lossless audio
Apple Music also includes a large number of so-called lossless tracks. It depends on what recording studio the recording was made in and what codec was used, but if you like to spoil your ears with quality music, you’ll undoubtedly find a choice here. However, you need to turn on the highest quality as you definitely won’t get it by default.
This category will be dominated by another service, though I consider the lossless music streaming service TIDAL to be the benchmark. Still, I haven’t tried it yet, but I know someone already very familiar with it, Jakub Jančík. How about telling us what TIDAL is?
Apple also came out with Spatial Audio a few years ago
This is something I don’t want, and I could do without it. Music should be properly mastered from the studio and output in stereo, anything else is unnatural, and for me, these are issues I don’t even listen to.
However, I have also given this side of Apple Music a go and tried recordings made directly for Spatial Audio, where turning your head in space, depending on where you turn, will highlight specific instruments or vocals. Yes, it’s interesting. It’s more of a feature than something for everyday listening.
Family Sharing
You can share this service with the family for a slightly higher monthly rate. So up to 5 people can use it simultaneously, which is okay.
Generate playlists
Here, the only things that work reliably are playing specific albums or manually creating playlists. Apple Music lacks, at least for me, one very important feature, which is the ability to mark something as unpopular and completely exclude it from the automatically generated playlists.
Apple Music only allows you to mark a song or artist as Suggest Less Like This, but even if you honestly mark what you don’t like with a thumbs down, Apple Music knows better than you what you will like, so in the generated playlists these artists, songs will still have.
I even found that at one time, I was getting playlists that were maybe 60% made up of that garbage to my ears. I don’t know if this is some trolling by the developers of this service, but even after pointing out this problem, nothing has happened to it.
Instead, it’s only getting worse as time goes on. Is it that Apple is making an effort by forcing something that, over time, you start to hate to please you? Well, at least for me, definitely not. I’ve been happy with Spotify in that regard. But I’d be interested to know where Google’s YouTube Music service stands on this question, Ondřej Svoboda.
Today's view on Apple Music
Today, the so-called music streaming platforms clearly dominate. For a monthly fee, you get access to an incredibly large music library, so you can immerse yourself in listening to your favourite artists, albums, stock or even specific playlists.
What’s more, these services have kick-started other platforms — it all started with music until streaming video content (Netflix, TV+, HBO MAX) and even gaming (GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud Gaming) became the norm. We can find many players in music streaming services that provide quality services.
The world leader is the Swedish company Spotify, which enjoys considerable popularity. But Apple also has its platform called Apple Music. But let’s pour clean wine. Apple Music and other providers are often hidden in the shadow of Spotify above. Even so, the Cupertino giant can still boast. Its platform is growing year after year with millions of additional subscribers.
Apple Music is experiencing growth.
The services segment is playing an increasingly important role at Apple. It generates more profits yearly, which is extremely important for the company. In addition to the music platform, it also offers the Apple Arcade gaming service, iCloud, Apple TV+, and Apple News+ and Apple Fitness+ are available abroad.
Moreover, as we mentioned above, the number of subscribers to Apple Music is growing by literally millions more year after year. While in 2015, “only” 11 million Apple Music users paid for the service, by 2021, it was already about 88 million. So the difference is substantial and clearly shows what people are interested in.
On the face of it, Apple Music is certainly something to brag about. It has a fairly solid subscriber base, which can more or less be expected to grow in the coming years. However, it is a “crumb” compared to rival service Spotify. As we mentioned above, Spotify is the overwhelming market leader in game streaming platforms.
The number of subscribers is a clear indication of this. Indeed, it was already 77 million in 2015, which is practically comparable to what Apple had to build up for years with its service. But since then, even Spotify has moved several levels ahead. In fact, by 2021, that number was already more than double, or 165 million users, which clearly speaks to its dominance.
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