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Apple Music is a Mess

As long as it is comparable to Beats I'll use it. I prefer Beats over Spotify and made the switch fairly early in Beats life.
 
Rogifan said:
Jason Snell nailed it on his podcast. This portion of the keynote was bloated, self indulgent and unfocused.

I don't see what Beats has brought to the party other than Eddy Cue didn't have a clue what to do with music and was suckered in by Jimmy's sales pitch that somehow he was the magic bullet that was going to solve all of Apple's music problems. The one thing successful about Beats is their headphones and Apple never talks about them.
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Those headphones are junk.
 
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Everything on the market is a mess. Every time I launch Spotify it feels like they are changing something. Maybe Apple music is bad, but its in bad company.
 
I agree that the presentation of Apple music was awkward (WWDC15, while enjoyable, did have a lot of corporate forced awkward moments...Free Bottom Fridays? Really?), I disagree that the model is all wrong. It's not confusing at all. It's very straight forward, and I'd say its easier to understand than Spotify is.

While they didn't meet my student pricing requirement, they did meet the curated playlists and the Multiplatform requirement, and I'm definitely switching over.
 
I think the way it was presented to us was more of a mess than the actual service itself. Mainly because I still have absolutely no idea HOW the service is actually going to work and how we're going to interact with it. I'm going to need a proper session of using it to form a proper opinion - that's obviously the same with most things, but especially this because they wanted to throw out big words and give us history lessons and music samples and celebrity endorsements but didn't actually tell us much/anything about the service itself lol.
 
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It really is far too early to tell. With 3 free months to try it out, I'm sure we'll all have a pretty fair opinion on the service by then.
 
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Hmm.. for me I feel Apple Music has brought Apple back to music scene BIG TIME. Through the keynote, I felt the determinations of people behind the service and that is a good sign.

But anyway, whether you like Apple Music or not if you are already a paid member of Spotify I say why don't cancel the membership and subscribed to Apple Music? At least you got equivalent music for free for a few months. If you don't like it, cancel it when it's about to charge your card and re-subscribe to Spotify. Win-win, no?
 
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matrix07 said:
Hmm.. for me I feel Apple Music has brought Apple back to music scene BIG TIME. Through the keynote, I felt the determinations of people behind the service and that is a good sign.

But anyway, whether you like Apple Music or not if you are already a paid member of Spotify I say why don't cancel the membership and subscribed to Apple Music? At least you got equivalent music for free for a few months. If you don't like it, cancel it when it's about to charge your card and re-subscribe to Spotify. Win-win, no?
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Maybe it's just me because I don't think music is that big of a deal. Sure Apple needs to have a streaming service just like Google does, just like Microsoft does. But it should've been no more than 15 minutes tops of the keynote. Apple actually glossed over or cut some really cool things related to OS X and iOS. And why, just so they could have 20 minutes of Eddy demoing the music app? To me there was nothing really unique about Apple Music. And it seems incredibly confusing trying to mix Pandora, Spotify, terrestrial radio and social networks all into one. Plus still having iTunes and iTunes match off to the side. I don't see simplicity here I see a muddled mess. And this new radio station sounds like a rip off of BBC Radio One, 1Xtra and Radio 6. If I want to listen to those stations I can easily stream them from the TuneIn app. I'm sure it will do well as this app will be installed on tens of millions of iPhones and iPads. But I don't think it's the big deal Apple was making it out to be. I don't think a streaming music service is that important and I don't think it will be a deciding factor in somebody choosing to buy an iPhone or an iPad.
 
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kmj2318 said:
I don't really understand the article's argument, and he seems to not really know what Apple Music does. Which I guess is more a failure of communication.
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Agreed, the pitch was tedious. No sparkle. I got bored after a few minutes. I kept the stream running, but tuned it out entirely. Every time I looked up to see if they'd moved onto something interesting (iPad pro?) it was just the same old crowd droning on.
 
Arran said:
Seems like a Ping do-over, but with a pushier sales guy.

Not impressed by either.
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Ping was a glorified share to Twitter button. But I use both iTunes Store and spotify and there is a big difference between buying and streaming music.

With the former you tend to appreciate music in a different manner. At £7.99 an album I had my music on repeat till I was sick of my favourite bands. I listened to each and every track on every album and not just blast it in the background, I paid attention and thoroughly listened to them.

Because that music actually had worth, as in a retail value. 99p a song?! Better get my money's worth. Streaming on the other hand is just about discovering an absolute banger. I listen to a way larger variety of artists nowadays with my spotify subscription, since if I listen to an album and think 'that was ****' then it's not longer £7.99 down the drain.

Streaming is to white labels as iTunes is to the vinyl. Less about collecting, more about discovery
 
Rogifan said:
Maybe it's just me because I don't think music is that big of a deal.
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Well there's your problem.

That said, the Apple Music part of the keynote could have been a little better. I think Apple Music looks fine though, I'll try it out and make a decision in three months if I want to buy in. I think it's clearly better than Spotify though, if only for the fact that Spotify's apps are terrible, and require Facebook.
 
Another scathing article on Apple's music service. Specifically Jimmy Iovine.

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2015/06/10/apple-music/
Apple Music provides nothing new other than a live radio service, which is mildly interesting, but never forget that iTunes Radio didn’t put a dent in Pandora. And sure, Beats 1 will make it worldwide before Pandora ever does, but is that what the world is clamoring for, a global radio service? I don’t think so.

But the heart and soul of Apple Music is its streaming service. And it broke the number one rule of technology. That in order to succeed you’ve got to deliver something better, bring in those who were disinterested or scared to participate previously, and there’s nothing in Apple Music that isn’t widely available elsewhere, including its social network and playlists. Is that what we need, a new place to display musicians’ thoughts and wares? You can’t compete with Facebook just like you can’t compete with Google. Innovation can kill them, but there’s nothing innovative about Connect other than it’s located on Apple’s platform.
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That’s right, there’s a huge backlash to Monday’s presentation. Primarily in the press, because the public doesn’t care. But you can’t find anybody saying anything good, from Iovine to Cue. Furthermore, there’s the story of the indie act having previous ties to Iovine and being fake. Those who care are aghast, even if most people don’t give a crap. But the truth is Iovine is tone-deaf. He’s way out of his league. He comes from a land where relationships and intimidation mean everything. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours and we’ll make it on the image of propped-up stars. But the truth is in the modern era the winners are faceless techies who go their own way, whether they be Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Evan Spiegel of Snapchat or Nick Woodman of GoPro. They’re giant slayers who think different, something Apple used to have a hold on.
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cmChimera said:
Well there's your problem.

That said, the Apple Music part of the keynote could have been a little better. I think Apple Music looks fine though, I'll try it out and make a decision in three months if I want to buy in. I think it's clearly better than Spotify though, if only for the fact that Spotify's apps are terrible, and require Facebook.
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Spotify might not be as good as the current Music app, but judging by the updated music app (which is just gutted with useless crap), not even Spotify can compete. I know we're talking about opinions here, but Spotify actually does not require Facebook. Get your facts right.
 
Noble Actual said:
Spotify might not be as good as the current Music app, but judging by the updated music app (which is just gutted with useless crap), not even Spotify can compete.
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I know we're talking about opinions here, so here's one. The ability to play any songs up next alone is worth any hassles, if there is any.
 
I don't think people are taking into account the fact that it's built in. Built in to iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac. I know we all know about Spotify, Rdio, and others, but for a lot of people who use the native music app and are only comfortable with the native music app they will be the ones that stick with it. And it's the same price as all the other services so why not go with the one that's built in. Plus a lot of older people from the iTunes age only buy music because that's what they trust. My grandparents only buy music from iTunes and don't really trust streaming services. When I told them about Apple Music they got really excited. Case and point.
 
Razeus said:
I'll use it because they Spotify UI on mobile is a disaster and they don't seem to improve this app in the slightest. I guess they can't afford UI people because the record labels are robbing them blind.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Back, back, back, back, back. Having to manually add songs to my Starred Playlist is terrible. It should work like Instagram were a double tab simply adds it to your started list.

Apple Music looks much clear. I'm glad they got rid of using words for buttons and just went with all symbols we all know.

Luckily, I don't have too much invested in Spotify since all my playlists are Spotify curations or some user. It's easy for me to switch. And Apple Music first 3 months are free, so that's a deal to me.

I'm a download to own guy and always found streaming a bit strange. I'll be going into Apple Music with a subscription only library and archiving my current iTunes music files.

#ripspotify
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I'm in the same boat. Besides the really bad UI/ caching problems (where is the clean my cache button?!) Spotify lost its focus with every update. An the upcoming podcast and music video integration will make it worse. I'am not interested in the social/multimedia functionality. I want to listen to music, nothing else.

The Apple Music presentation at WWDC was a complete failure. I had to look up nearly everything at apple.com, because they didn't even clearly communicate Offline Sync capabilities. The Music App UI looks a bit bloated and i am not a huge fan of Connect and enormous album covers. But full (visual) integration into iOS, easy playlist management, better curated playlist will probably win me over. I really want to try it.
 
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