Apple Music is killing me softly with its songs

[riverfreak]

I’ve wrestled with AM for years and it just seems to be getting worse. Many of the problems relate to matching.

* matched music from my collection replaced with live versions, remastered versions, or songs from completely different albums and artists altogether

* matched albums that were uploaded suddenly becoming grayed out and unavailable with a “this item is no longer available in your region”. This isn’t just one or two songs, but thousands.

* downloaded music for offline listening totally and completely disappearing — like right when I’m going offline for a few weeks

* and don’t even get me started on album art

It’s almost like Apple Music was designed not only by people who never listen to music, but who don’t even know very much about organizing principles of information science.

Although I enjoy listening and discovering new music, I’m really close to just dumping Apple Music and going back to loading my own static collection.

I’ve got my whole collection backed up on Amazon Music which doesn’t have nearly the same extent of problems as AM. I also have Dropbox and iCloud backups, neither of which are very good for listening of course.

It doesn’t seem like wanting to listen to music that I own, across multiple devices, as well as stream occasional content from AM should be so difficult. What am I doing wrong?

 

[bluecoast]

I left AM for pretty much the same reasons as you say, a year ago. Sad to say that it still sounds the same.

I’m really surprised at how poor AM is. It shouldn’t be too hard for them to get great recommendations and great editorial playlists and landing pages. But it seems like it is too hard. And they have the money. So maybe it’s just that they can’t be bothered and have enough growth not to need to improve the service.

I don’t work for Spotify but give them a go. Their recommendations are really really good but they definitely prioritise a song / playlist experience over traditional albums.

 

[riverfreak]

I’ve been sticking with AM because I went to so much effort to get my collection synced. That was back in the days when matching would just stall out, fail for no reason, etc.

But AM is a lot less sticky to me when I go to listen to music that I own and have purchased and it is mysteriously unavailable.

 

[tonyr6]

I’m really surprised at how poor AM is. It shouldn’t be too hard for them to get great recommendations and great editorial playlists and landing pages. But it seems like it is too hard. And they have the money. So maybe it’s just that they can’t be bothered and have enough growth not to need to improve the service.

I agree there playlist stations are so bad it is laughable. Apple Music is really designed for listening to full albums but just try to do that with that iTunes bloated program when it is not locking up.