More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
It is nice to be able to buy the music as well if you want to support. Being part of Apple One is huge as well.
The latest music streaming royalty rates are as follows.
PLATFORM ROYALTY (PER STREAM) STREAMS TO MAKE $1
Tidal Music $0.01284 78
Apple Music $0.008 125
Amazon Music $0.00402 249
Spotify $0.00318 314
YouTube Music $0.002 500
Pandora $0.00133 752
Deezer $0.0011 909
Some of their patents for tracking are a bit dystopian as well.
New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music
> The streaming platform is interested in extracting data points like emotional state, gender, age, and accent to hone its recommendations [2].
Nah. Apple already has my info and reasonably treats it well eventhough it is too much, I don't need another service to invade privacy.
[1] https://producerhive.com/music-marketing-tips/streaming-roya...
[2] https://pitchfork.com/news/new-spotify-patent-involves-monit...
Is there a need to integrate with anything? All I need is to play music. Spotify is as integrated into macOS and iOS as Apple Music.
> More importantly though it is one of the highest paying per stream to artists [1]. Streaming needs to be much more lucrative for artists and consumer choice helps that.
Too bad they are shooting themselves in the foot by neglecting user experience.
I do like a more open/api platform and wish Apple was, but Spotify probably won't be for long. Tracking my plays takes more work with everything to closed.
Apple misses some of the obscure stuff but I will always side with the higher payer to artists. I also like just being able to buy albums I like and support artists.
However, I do think it’s anti-competitive. Spotify, for example, has absolutely no possible way to get my business until and unless my entire family were to ditch Apple.
I don’t like the Music UI but I’ve come to understand how to use it and it no longer bothers me.
Read this article to learn how $ payouts per stream are determined: https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2022/02/music-streaming-real...
It's all pro-rated. 52% of Apple Music revenues go to labels, by contract; Spotify is around the same. Royalties are just revenues divided by # of streams (simplification).
Spotify's free users give lower royalty rates per stream, and Premium users give higher ones. If Spotify users like rap more than AM users, then rap will have higher rates on Spotify than Apple Music, since a larger proportion of revenue will go to the same amount of rap songs.
If Apple Music is more painful to use than Spotify, or has worse discoverability, then people won't listen to as many songs (or won't leave it on for 8h as background noise) as with Spotify, and royalties will be higher per stream than Spotify. The higher royalties don't make up for the lower # of streams since discoverability benefits small artists.
This has very little to do with the service, and as everything to do with the Big Four (now Three) [1] that control basically all of music.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation
This happens on my ipad, mac, android phone.
It feels like some server is spinning up a hard drive to stream it.
Apart from that, why the hell is the title and artist only shown in one line that starts scolling instead of showing multiple lines if it doesn't fit, at least in the album view and the player. It's such a pain listening to classical music when the composer and the performer and section are not visible without playing it and waiting for the line to scroll, like wtf.
You are sitting in a chair in the sky.
I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee. In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15. In the 2000s I was finding stuff that I could pirate, downloading it, and playing it on my beige desktop computer because there was no such thing as a smartphone.
But the experience of playing songs feels like it’s taken a big step backwards into some sort of weird corporate happy land. The fact I we still can’t remove podcasts from Spotify is ridiculous. I tried Apple Music but I bounced almost immediately because of the UI.
A feature of the modern smartphone ownership experience is being bombarded with ads for clones of existing businesses, the best of which are almost as good as those pre-existing offerings.
The Music, TV, News, and Books icons on the home screen are really just ads. Each of these "apps" contains a prominent ad, followed by a torrent of push notification ads.
In a way, the home screen is a re-imagining of AOL from the 90s: a crippled proprietary take on the web, spoon-fed to a captive audience, lacking the egalitarianism that allows companies like Spotify and Netflix to thrive.
Not at all what I expect from apple. Honestly the only reason Spotify still exists is because Apple and Google are doing such a dismal job.
All that said though, G killed the public API for music which is a horrible tragedy to me. I may yet still go back to spotify just for the API.
It what happens when you use Leetcode proficiency to find your developers.
They acquired Primephonic to address this, but no results yet.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/08/apple-acquires-classi...
If it's really that long, it sounds like it's literally spinning up an actual vinyl record.
I DO NOT TRUST APPLE anymore.
Like Xcode, so many of their first party apps on Mac are just badly made and awful to use
i’ve never seen an app that can crash or lock the whole operating system
design-wise it looks completely out of place
A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea about Apple's software, with the exception of macOS. The point of the software is to entice the customer with a complete ecosystem. Once they've sold you their laptop they've made their money. At that point, they're not that interested in putting resources towards things like Music when their hardware continues to sell quite well.
I'm not advocating for that approach, but it is what it is.
Music is an ongoing subscription service, with plenty of competition. If they want to retain or grow their paying subscribers Apple needs to improve their software with the same attention to quality they devote to hardware.
Apple TV is pretty bad. I can't recall ever using it without a freeze or a crash. It's embarrassing for a company with the amount of money Apple has.
This is the reason why I'm bought into the Google ecosystem. I would say that Google is the least bad at software of any of the major tech companies. I would probably use Chromebooks if I could get proper drivers for my beloved RME hardware.
But it's not just an Apple problem. It feels like the vast majority of software, you can open it up and fiddle around for a few minutes and find any number of poorly conceived UX choices not to mention straight up bugs / inconsistencies. I'm not talking "I could make this software better than they did" level stuff, just things that any reasonable person would admit don't make sense.
1) debt/mortgage
2) kids
3) vesting stock
4) all of the above
In the end for all of these services you are exposed to the whims of their dev/management team. The only way around this problem is probably a regulation from the government to force services to offer a consistent unchanging api so that third party clients can be build and fix all of these problems.
although i currently work at faang as a contractor and certainly the level of ability is not what you might think from the outside.
Lightweight, all free-software, can handle a massive audio-database, all synchronized. What else do we need ?
As far as the slowness goes, I attribute that to the fact that the app is not native, it's just some sort of Electron-like mess. Then again so is Spotify (I think?) and it feels much snappier.
If I click in the search box and start typing, the box will lose focus at some random time and all my next keystrokes will count as play commands, usually pausing the music. If I come back to the search box, it happens again.
I know "text boxes" are cutting-edge technology that's barely 3 seconds old and developers are still learning to program them safely. Still, I expected more from a trillion-dollar company.
I use Apple Music and it's got all sorts of problems. "Hey Siri, play Chill Mix" "Sorry, I'm having trouble finding that in your library."
Chill Mix is generated from Apple Music based on what you play. I use it every morning except those days it just can't be found.The iOS app wastes three out of five buttons at the bottom that I can't change to something useful: "Listen Now" "Browse" "Radio" are all weak "discovery" tools that are probably more about label kickbacks than actually helping me find new music that I like.
And really, I don't need your discovery Apple - what I need is better library discovery/organization tools because I have a massive library which is unwieldy in your crap apps.
The album-centric focus is a huge PitA due to singles. Give me an Artist playlist that doesn't take up a precious playlist slot.
Maybe this isn't entirely Apple's fault, but when I see greyed out songs or albums that were once there that aren't anymore, I feel pushed to stop giving these scumbag labels my cash through your service.
I left out the bugs, but I feel that the quality of their flagship services product makes them look like a dying company, not a premium brand worth 2.5t$
Library > Playlists > Playlist name > Play/Shuffle
Four taps just to get my own music to start playing. Maddening that 3 of the 5 buttons are dedicated to not my music.
You can't add Apple Music playlists to playlist folders, and playlists can only be sorted alphabetically. On the Mac, your playlist folders are on top; then Apple Music playlists & your playlists are mixed together. On iPhone, it's reversed; Apple Music playlists, then your folders, forcing you to scroll all the way down to get to your playlists. And on Mac you can't add a song to a new playlist in a playlist folder directly; you need to add a song to a new playlist, and drag that playlist (that isn't highlighted) all the way up to the right folder. Yuck.
I like that likes and add to library are distinct as they serve two very different purposes for me, but I would really like to have a "liked" playlist.
Other annoyances (on macOS): search in apple music vs library, the search box is on one end, the scope selector is on the other. Toggling it requires re-searching. It also gets covered by the right pane. "hey I'm actually searching" feedback is terrible, many parts are ungodly slow for no reason.
Oh and that search box has awful behaviour regarding focus, click, start typing, and somehow it gets focused only a second later, missing input and/or not clearing what's in there, or restoring the previous content. It seems to have about a thousand subtle failure modes that keep getting in the way extremely annoyingly.
Sadly (personal pov/use case) Apple Music is the "best" (== less worst) app/service out there, from the mobile UI to library management, tag editor, and BYOM+streaming.
Tangent: after some time peaking and being actually good, all these music apps/streaming services have become so annoying that I'm progressively rebuilding my library (including all the non-owned discoveries I made) as flat files served by Jellyfin, which will probably take me years but ultimately I'll be able to drop the increasingly crappy app+service verticals in favour of owned music + radio for discovery (there are a couple of great curated radios around here, and a few zines made out of thin slices of dead trees)
I wonder how Apple engineers use the application. Are they not also frustrated?
We're always making fun of that at a die-hard Apple fanboy friend of mine. To add insult to injury, Apple Music is gender-mainstreamed in German (should be a config option IMO).
But give it time; Apple is certainly able to get it right eventually. Other players have degraded as well IMHO.
Hmm, I'm actually glad that iTunes in its old form still lives on in Windows, because AFAIK the dedicated Podcasts app that has replaced iTunes in that regard on Macs no longer supports manually adding files as a podcast episode – something I've made heavily use of in order to get that nice listened/unlistened tracking for various radio comedy shows I've obtained through other means.
For one version. Then, some hot-head new grad will come in and make it whatever UX fashion of the week will be and screw it up for another 5 years.
Yes, it is Electron but Apple did use webviews in their macOS AM app as well before they switched back to native earlier this year; which still isn't that great.
Ironically, Cider works better than the Apple's web app as well; it doesn't skip or get stuck once in a while. It just works for what I need.
(In case other asks, Windows/Linux is more of a work/secondary platform, and iPhone is the main device most of the time. That's why I'd use Apple Music despite having the other platforms).
If only the Android app weren't such a mess...
https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/music-subscriber-market-s...
Pre caching? Yes but sometimes I don’t see how it could have reasonably guessed that I might play that particular song, like when I start typing to search and then stab at an entry in the results.
Surely they also want to be doing some buffering, so if they are pre caching a tiny bit of songs then they need to load the next piece of data quickly before I’ve heard the first part, but there is no obvious issue where this fails, as I might expect to hear.
Also when I seek in a song it’s almost always instant. They have the whole song quickly enough for the whole thing to be seekable?
If they were just relying on great latency and bandwidth then there should be a lot more issues with the audio pausing or dropping out.
It's that bad.
I’ve noticed that on my iPad with a few different video services. Makes me wonder if there’s a buggy video-download API.
In any case, absolutely maddening when you’re trying to “fill up” your device on hotel WiFi before a flight.
- Consistently recommends music I like - Spotify went down a rabbit hole with a certain genre and got weirder every week
- Opens instantly
- Integrates perfectly with Siri
- Doesn’t have the weird colour scheme of Spotify
It’s just great!
I didn’t even know there were alternatives. Are there any decent ones?
[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/28/cider-is-an-alternative-apple...
There’s some weird bugs for sure and the lack of switching between devices is annoying. Sometimes I’ll accidentally leave it running in my laptop and then when I’m on my phone it keeps interrupting for some reason.
Their shuffle actually shuffles, it’s not just the same 20 songs.
Artist matching is weird though. Frequently I’ll have an artist that songs attributed to them that are from a different artist with the same name. You could now check the electronic artist Danger (songs like 11:02) and see some weird new Russian rap song attributed to him as a “Single”. It’s not his song but it ends up in my NEW MUSIC MIX. I had it with artists like SIERRA and ALEX too. Incredibly annoying.
I have this problem across Mac laptop and android phone.
Another good one:
If you start a station on macOS. You can’t hit previous song to go back.
If you’re on iOS you can…
Apple Music is pretty terrible. So many times there’s no UI feedback when pressing things and they just glitch into some new state seconds after pressing things
This happens with YouTube Music as well and it is incredibly annoying. So weird how this same kind of thing would happen with multiple services.
For me it's been mostly Aesop Rock and Big KRIT albums that frequently change from Explicit -> Censored versions, but it's happened with other artists as well.
I have moved to spotify but I am still overcoming the grief :(
Sorry about your old library. Don't trust Spotify either! You can download a listing on your account page.
Watching Netflix with Safari, and then going to the Apple Music local library ("Recently Added", then click on an album) literally broke Music. It looked like this[0], all the Music toolbar buttons were gone, and keyboard shortcuts (spacebar to play) no longer worked. Pausing the movie and switching Safari tab to non-Netflix was the only solution. This was still the case on a completely clean install with only Music and Safari launched. I guess it had to do with the DRM Safari uses to play Netflix content messing with the Music app.
But did Apple really never test watching a movie and listening to music at the same time, with the built-in apps? That bug survived from early Big Sur to at least the Monterey release candidate, again on a completely clean install (I didn't test it again afterwards). Huh? How?
Listen, I feel your pain, but don't feel bad about this. Streaming services didn't exist back then. The best we could do was have some reasonably-sized collection on purchased CDs that we ripped to MP3, supplemented by a digital collection acquired through ... different means.
It took the (recording) industry years before they woke up. That's not your fault.
Thinking back, I could even imagine an alternate late 90s / early 2000s, where the RIAA was tolerant of the streaming model, but most peoples' connections were still dial-up / weak broadband, so we'd all be content with ~64kbps-quality MP3 playback lol
Here are some suggestions for Apple to improve Apple Music on macOS:
Fix the bugs, and make navigation fast!
While it's true that these are hard things to do, I think the author may be getting at a deeper issue here. For some reason the software world of today thinks delivering more crappy half baked features is more important than making usable bug free features, or even just fixing what already exists. I don't know where this idea came from, but it's a very annoying ideology.
The Unity game engine is another big corporation that does this. They released that demo awhile ago showing off how they can create realistic looking game scenes (the chess scene demo). I don't understand why they think that appeals to anyone. I'm pretty sure like 90% of people use Unity to make 2D games or low poly 3D games. And instead of fixing all their broken "features" they continue adding "features" nobody cares about or asked for.
1. The playing song's time elapsed and time remaining are only displayed when you hover over the toolbar and disappear otherwise. WTF?!?
2. Sometimes when I press play, the app goes into an endless shuffle where it keeps selecting new random songs and doesn't play anything. I have to quit the app and start over.
3. The delete key stopped working in a selected song in a playlist on Monterey.
4. The Filter field doesn't appear in the window unless I press option-command-f first. Sigh.
It was so destructive that my only option was to disable Apple Music, completely remove my whole iTunes music/data folder and restore everything from backup.
—-
I also recently realised that the Mac OS upgrade broke my iTunes playlists again, I’m not sure if it was during move to Bug Sur or earlier. I have a whole folder of music and an iTunes db file, anyone how Im supposed to import that into Music considering that iTunes is dead?
I’m back on Spotify.
In comparison, Spotify has grown overly complex and feels weird in terms of UI responsiveness to me.
I only have two problems with the ios app, but they're annoying enough. One is making you find a button to transition to a second screen to get to basic play controls, then find another button-like thing (even now I can't tell you off the top of my head where it is) to get back. I do not understand why the "play a song" interface needs multiple pages.
The other thing is that once every few hours I get the popup: "song isn't authorized" and I have to click around on shit until the app remembers that yes it actually is authorized because I pay $10 a month for it to be. I'd like to hear the UX rationale for showing a message which to 99.9% of their users just means "We're not going to play your song right now, for no particular reason except that computers don't work in general" and to the rest means "We're not going to play this song right now, even though we probably could if we were less paranoid, or better software engineers, which is an us problem but we'd rather make it a you problem"
Therefore Apple Music is literally unusable if you have a large library of songs not on iTunes (like indie electronic stuff) and don’t want iTunes to identify them and switch them to Apple Music songs.
The usability sucks too. How in god’s name do you make an app in 2022 that has unclickable artist and album names sprinkled throughout? It’s incredible how terrible iTunes was and how long Apple is allowing it to drag everything down.
This bugs me to no end. I'm always asking myself if a song is worth the listening interruption that will happen when I add it to a playlist.
Such a stupid low hanging bug.
Apple decided my credit card expired (it didn’t).
Unlike other services, if you stop paying, it deletes your entire library (including playlists) from all your devices. So if you want to switch to another music service, you’re hosed.
I’ve been fighting for a week or so now to get my playlist data via the privacy tools. Just yesterday they decided to give me a list of all my app downloads, instead of what I asked for.
Apple wants me to pay to get back access, but I’m not willing to give their services division another $0.01 until they stop treating customers like shit.
* the bar for scrubbing is what, 2 pixels wide?
* airplay is broken. it does. not. work. It takes about 5 iterations of pausing, restarting things, and prayer to get it to play through its speakers and a homepod. And god forbid you then pause it for a couple minutes or want to hear something from the browser for a second.
* If you want to mirror to an appletv and hear sound... good luck, be sure to designate a beneficiary before embarking because you'll probably want to kill yourself.
These aren't complicated things to identify or describe. They aren't edge cases. It's the basic functionality and it is absolute shit. How can anything get this bad? Do apple employees not listen to music? Is each feature made by a different siloed team? It doesn't take a silicon valley visionary to fix these things, but they are clearly missing something in their org
> Before You Submit
> ...
> Make sure you:
> - Test your app for crashes and bugs
Every time I used this app all I could think is "who is Apple to judge my app?!"
> Hitting play will start the music at some sound level, after about a second or two the sound level is suddenly reduced (and stays at that level until hitting pause and play again).
This is likely due to "Sound Check" being enabled (I think it's on by default), which you can un-check in the "Playback" section of the Music app's preferences.
It almost sounds like proper competition would do some good here.
About half the time when I use it on the desktop I have to force quit Music. I have no idea how a non-technical person would use something so buggy.
[1] "Spotify Users Growing Impatient and Canceling Subscriptions Over Lack of Native HomePod Support" : https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/spotify-users-impatient...
[2] "[iOS] Implement Native HomePod Support" : https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/iOS-Implement-Na...
With Apple TV I had similar experiences - compared to Netflix, the UX was just horrible. In a way it made me feel good - if a company with so much money as Apple can fail so miserably, it is fine if I as a developer make mistakes too sometimes :)
the amount of usability issues the app has are phenomenal
i was actually more surprised when it worked rather when it didn’t
not worth my $9.99
Currently streaming: JS Bach, Sonatas for Viola da Gamba, Sergei Istomin and Viviana Sofronitsky which I had to type 'cause you can't even cut-n-paste out that piece of junk.
Also on the desktop app the way to find new jazz releases is to first put the curser in the search input which opens a secret menu. Is there a way for me to “favorite” new jazz releases so that I can check it each week without so much scrolling and clicking?
I will happily yell at Apple employees while wearing a turtleneck if that's what it's gonna take.
It's UI is clearly designed by someone who 1) only listens to recent popular music, 2) isn't particularly passionate about any music they listen to, and 3) don't bother to look for new music that isn't in the top-10. Basically the last kind of person who should ever do UI design - no passion or knowledge about the application or the market!
1. Delete all playlists 2. Buy a MacBook 3. In the music.app, re-create the playlists. 4. Then, sync your iPhone’s music library including the just created playlists with the MacBook.
Took me a while to figure this out
I even started using Spotify just because at least syncing playlists would just work in that app.
Listening to music has become less fun and the experience objectively worse, even as the catalog of available titles has grown to include everything. It’s not as delightful an experience as it once was.
Please, no! I often purchase a song I streamed because I liked it and want to have it even if the streaming service goes away or loses its license to stream that song or album!
I have filed so many radars against Music.app and they’ve never been fixed over the years. IMO, It’s gotten significantly worse since iTunes got broken apart in Catalina.