Jim Dalrymple: Apple Music is a nightmare and I'm done with it

[flur]

If he really doesn't run a backup, then I have officially lost all respect for the guy. And then, frankly, even writing about how he lost his files is quite embarrassing. It's like an acclaimed surgeon writing a paper about how he amputated a person's arm instead of his appendix.

I suspect that he may actually have a backup, but he's reporting that he doesn't because otherwise it's just much ado about nothing. It's a HUGE issue that should be reported to the public and Apple should have to look at it, but the minute someone admits they just ran TM and had it fixed in an hour, it suddenly seems like not such a big deal.

So I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt here. He's presenting himself as clueless, but TBF, Apple is doing the same by releasing iCML with all the same bugs as Match. His faux cluelessness (if that's what it is) is harmless whereas Apple's is potentially devastating to a non-techie music lover who doesn't back up regularly.

 

[Rogifan]

Here's what former Apple employee Matt Drance said on Twitter:

Matt Drance ‏@drance 2h2 hours ago
The new Music app isn't just bad. It's designed around a business initiative, rather than user interest or intuition. That is so worrisome.

Matt Drance ‏@drance 2h2 hours ago
I didn't put my finger on it until just now. Design is full of risks, mistakes, iteration. But this redesign kind of wasn't a mistake.

Matt Drance ‏@drance 2h2 hours ago
I'm making this distinction because we need to go easy on the people who worked on it. It seems clear their hands were impossibly forced.

And the most damning:
Matt Drance ‏@drance 55m55 minutes ago
@benthompson I actually turned the Keynote off. Walked out of the theater. First time ever.

One gets the feeling the music industry and record labels were driving this not Apple. And in some ways I think having Jimmy on point made this worse not better as he comes from the business. I wonder if Steve were still around perhaps things would have been different. It does make me a bit nervous that Apple's TV product will be a less than great user experience with the content/cable companies calling the shots.

 

[Rigby]

One gets the feeling the music industry and record labels were driving this not Apple. And in some ways I think having Jimmy on point made this worse not better as he comes from the business. I wonder if Steve were still around perhaps things would have been different. It does make me a bit nervous that Apple's TV product will be a less than great user experience with the content/cable companies calling the shots.

I don't think "the music industry" had anything to do with it. The design feels forced because Apple Music is not a focused design. It's a weird amalgam of Spotify, Pandora, iTunes Match and the iTunes store with some advertising and social features thrown in. It feels like a "design by committee". I agree that the design was driven by business interest, but I don't think it had anything to do with outside influence. It's nobody's responsibility but Apple's.

 

[boltjames]

I don't think "the music industry" had anything to do with it. The design feels forced because Apple Music is not a focused design. It's a weird amalgam of Spotify, Pandora, iTunes Match and the iTunes store with some advertising and social features thrown in. It feels like a "design by committee". I agree that the design was driven by business interest, but I don't think it had anything to do with outside influence. It's nobody's responsibility but Apple's.

Apple Music is the Columbia House Record Club of the 2000s.

After you pay your $12 and get all the archived classic music you ever wanted in the first month, you're stuck paying for crappy new releases forever.

BJ

 

[Paco II]

Really, one thread wasn't enough for this silliness? You had to bring it here as well?

Apple Music is the Columbia House Record Club of the 2000s.

After you pay your $12 and get all the archived classic music you ever wanted in the first month, you're stuck paying for crappy new releases forever.

BJ

 

[boltjames]

Really, one thread wasn't enough for this silliness? You had to bring it here as well?

There is nothing silly about this, in fact, it's the absolute perfect analogy. The music industry has worked this way forever, the key for them is to get the old back catalog sold again and again so as to offset the risks and losses assumed by releasing new music.

I have purchased (or gifted as a kid) no less than 8 versions of Abbey Road: Vinyl, 8 Track, Playtape, Picture Disc, Cassette, Masterworks LP, Compact Disc, Compact Disc Remastered. Thank God I never got into Quadraphonic, Reel to Reel, or Mini Disc. With the advent of MP3's and AAC's that resourcing model is shot to hell and the record companies screwed themselves, no different than the TV market whose LCD HDTV's are so good they never need upgrading or replacing.

Apple Music is the 'format of the moment' and it's an attempt by the record companies to get you to pay for the same old stuff all over again and, worse, make you pay for the new releases whether they are good or not. "Streaming subscription" is the new 8 Track Tape for a business that has no physical media to fall back on and no new sonic pastures to present.

BJ

 

[Rogifan]

I don't think "the music industry" had anything to do with it. The design feels forced because Apple Music is not a focused design. It's a weird amalgam of Spotify, Pandora, iTunes Match and the iTunes store with some advertising and social features thrown in. It feels like a "design by committee". I agree that the design was driven by business interest, but I don't think it had anything to do with outside influence. It's nobody's responsibility but Apple's.

Well I've seen some tweets that suggest the record labels wouldn't let Apple split iTunes and Apple Music.

 

[CaTOAGU]

Really, one thread wasn't enough for this silliness? You had to bring it here as well?

Apple Music is the Columbia House Record Club of the 2000s.

After you pay your $12 and get all the archived classic music you ever wanted in the first month, you're stuck paying for crappy new releases forever.

BJ

He isn't being silly, this is exactly what the streaming model represents. If you stream music you're renting it, you never own it, which means to continue to listen to it, you always have to pay. This is what the music industry has wanted all along, everyone paying for the same music forever and no one owning any of it. DRM, which many fought so hard against has now made a return and there's also no guarantee that the price of renting won't go up in the future, once enough people are on board.

Now that's not to say streaming has no upsides, if you listen to a lot of new music it may be worth it to you, I'm still deciding if it's worth it for me. But, don't be under any illusions that this isn't what the labels have wanted from the start.

 

[Rogifan]

He isn't being silly, this is exactly what the streaming model represents. If you stream music you're renting it, you never own it, which means to continue to listen to it, you always have to pay. This is what the music industry has wanted all along, everyone paying for the same music forever and no one owning any of it. DRM, which many fought so hard against has now made a return and there's also no guarantee that the price of renting won't go up in the future, once enough people are on board.

Now that's not to say streaming has no upsides, if you listen to a lot of new music it may be worth it to you, I'm still deciding if it's worth it for me. But, don't be under any illusions that this isn't what the labels have wanted from the start.

So how come iTunes music sales are declining and have been for a while? Clearly many consumers want to rent music vs owning it.

 

[CaTOAGU]

So how come iTunes music sales are declining and have been for a while? Clearly many consumers want to rent music vs owning it.

Clearly some of them think its worth it for them but it doesn't change the fact that historically the music labels have always wanted people to not own the music they paid for. Many people aren't thinking of the longer term either I suspect.

 

[manu chao]

The library is part of that, as are all the music files, but he wasn't backing up. You gotta back up to have a backup.

But yes, that's how I restored mine - I rolled Time Machine back to my last backup before AM launched, and restored the entire music folder.

It's easy to forget when you're in these forums that there are folks out there who have never turned on Time Machine.

Or cheaped out and excluded their iTunes library from TM instead of upgrading their TM drive to a larger one when it ran out of space (in as much that the TM backup history become fairly short).

 

[tkermit]

So how come iTunes music sales are declining and have been for a while? Clearly many consumers want to rent music vs owning it.

It's possibly not just about that. The iTunes Store has not improved in comparison to other digital music stores either, specifically in terms of the audio quality that's on offer. Personally my music buying habits have just about stayed the same for the past few years. I add about 1000-1500 legally acquired music files each year to my library. At the same time I've drastically reduced the number of iTunes Music purchases from a few hundred per year around the end of the last decade to recently only something like 50 per year. And that number is bound to further decline as I see the iTunes Store only as a last resort for getting music.

 

[MentalFloss]

Now that's not to say streaming has no upsides, if you listen to a lot of new music it may be worth it to you, I'm still deciding if it's worth it for me. But, don't be under any illusions that this isn't what the labels have wanted from the start.

When MP3 was invented, within a short time, platforms like Napster appeared, and people started talking about how the music industry has to adjust to the Internet, how they are stupid for still not having adjusted to the modern world, how it is really about time that they learned how to deal with the Internet, and so on and so on. There are probably a million forum posts where someone has said this.

Now the record companies have adjusted to the realities of the Internet and people don't like it.

And I have no idea why people complain about it. It just seems to be whining for the sake of whining with a heavy dose of naivety. Radio has been around for about a hundred years now. I don't think people ever really complained "Oh, radio is stupid, because I don't own the music I listen to!" Streaming is like radio, except I can pick which music I want to listen to (at least I consider that an advantage) and it's ad-free (I think that's good) and you don't deal with DJs talking over a song you like (also great). And for these advantages, I pay a relatively small fee. "Oh, boohoo, but I still don't own the music being played on that so-called streaming radio!" Yes, that's not new. It's been that way for a hundred years. "But at least radio is free!" No, it isn't. Anyone who believes that is just terribly naive (and apparently believes that it doesn't cost anything to run a radio station). You've been paying for it all along, whether you wanted it or not and whether you liked the music that was played there or not. And you still never owned any of the music being played there.

 

[manu chao]

The problem here is that there seems to be a bug that Apple is not publicly acknowledging in which AM/iTunes/iCML gets confused about what is and isn't AM music. If it thinks a file belongs to AM, it may modify that file at will, and when you turn off AM or iCML, it deletes that file. There are quite a few people who are NOT match subscribers (and never have been) here in the forums that have seen this issue. So it's more than best practices - there's actual coding logic that need to be fixed.

I had one problem where I added a playlist from Apple Music to My Music that contained a song I already had in my library (purchased from iTunes years ago). The song in that playlist came from the Deluxe version of an album, the song in my library came from the 'standard' version of the album. Technically the two song files were identical except for the name of the album in their metadata.

That stuff can happen and in itself would not be the end of the world. This could happen even before Apple Music if you bought two different albums which had some common songs. And there is no ideal way to deal with that. In principle every playlist from Apple Music could have a list of all albums that contain a particular song in the playlist and if a users saves that playlist, whichever album the user already has with that song gets listed in the metadata for that song in the playlist. But once users start to delete stuff or manually change the metadata for songs they have ripped themselves from CDs, things can get messy quickly.

What I saw, was the same song listed twice in one album and starting to play it, both songs indicated that they were being played at the same time. Clearly a bug, but given the potential complexity, it is not surprising that there are some bugs.

 

[manu chao]

When you pay for "It Just Works" and they deliver "It Works Just", does not make for happy customers.

The funny thing is that Apple very, very rarely uses the 'It just works' slogan. It is almost always the users that use it when explaining why they prefer Macs or iPhones.

 

[npmacuser5]

The funny thing is that Apple very, very rarely uses the 'It just works' slogan. It is almost always the users that use it when explaining why they prefer Macs or iPhones.

The quote goes back to keynotes by Steve Jobs. Been around for a good deal of time. However, my point, I purchase Apple products at a premium price point so I can use them as advertised. In the last couple years Apple products have consumed a good deal of my time looking into why this or that feature either does not work or works just. A bit of a rant.

 

[CaTOAGU]

When MP3 was invented, within a short time, platforms like Napster appeared, and people started talking about how the music industry has to adjust to the Internet, how they are stupid for still not having adjusted to the modern world, how it is really about time that they learned how to deal with the Internet, and so on and so on. There are probably a million forum posts where someone has said this.

Now the record companies have adjusted to the realities of the Internet and people don't like it.

And I have no idea why people complain about it. It just seems to be whining for the sake of whining with a heavy dose of naivety. Radio has been around for about a hundred years now. I don't think people ever really complained "Oh, radio is stupid, because I don't own the music I listen to!" Streaming is like radio, except I can pick which music I want to listen to (at least I consider that an advantage) and it's ad-free (I think that's good) and you don't deal with DJs talking over a song you like (also great). And for these advantages, I pay a relatively small fee. "Oh, boohoo, but I still don't own the music being played on that so-called streaming radio!" Yes, that's not new. It's been that way for a hundred years. "But at least radio is free!" No, it isn't. Anyone who believes that is just terribly naive (and apparently believes that it doesn't cost anything to run a radio station). You've been paying for it all along, whether you wanted it or not and whether you liked the music that was played there or not. And you still never owned any of the music being played there.

I'm not crying about it however people need to go into this with their eyes open:

It's a small fee now, it won't necessarily stay a small fee. Prices can go up as well as down.

Radio is free at the point of use, streaming music isn't, at least it won't be for much longer IMO.

Comparing radio to peoples music collections is asinine. People don't pay an upfront subscription to listen to commercial radio, with some exceptions for satellite radio. People do pay for their music collections on C.D or from iTunes or from Apple Music/Spotify etc. If you pay for a C.D it's your's forever, the same with DRM free tracks from iTunes. Apple Music files are DRM restricted as are Spotify's, when you stop paying you stop listening.

 

[dk001]

So how come iTunes music sales are declining and have been for a while? Clearly many consumers want to rent music vs owning it.

Between iTunes, Amazon Music, and Google Music, iTunes is usually not the cheapest. So why would I buy via iTunes?

 

[boltjames]

So how come iTunes music sales are declining and have been for a while? Clearly many consumers want to rent music vs owning it.

Stop, that's ridiculous.

Downloading in iTunes represents over 80% of the market, paid Streaming represents less than 2%. Paid streaming is not the problem for "music sales declining". Pandora, iTunes Radio, iHeart Radio, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are the problem.

There is so much free music and so much of it sounds the same, there is not really a big reason to buy anything anymore. Listen, I have a 25,000 song collection ripped from CD's and purchased from iTunes. I have 100s of Playlists. I'm about as hardcore as it comes to buying music. But 1 hour with Pandora in 2011 changed everything. Type in a song or band you like, boom, instant streaming of dozens of songs you previously loved or just discovered, it's brilliant. Have a pool party pick a single song or genre, that's that.

"Free Streaming" is good for consumers and is killing record sales. "Subscription Streaming" is lousy for consumers and will overpay record companies for a bad product one one wants anymore. No one wants to "rent music". They get it for free. It's a stupid industry competing against itself.

Savvy?

BJ

 

[OllyW]

Downloading in iTunes represents over 80% of the market, paid Streaming represents less than 2%. Paid streaming is not the problem for "music sales declining". Pandora, iTunes Radio, iHeart Radio, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are the problem.

Physical sales still bring as much revenue in as all digital distribution combined, with streaming making up approximately a third of the digital income.

 

[Rigby]

Well I've seen some tweets that suggest the record labels wouldn't let Apple split iTunes and Apple Music.

I've seen tweets suggesting that the moonlandings were faked too. I'm pretty certain the integration was Apple's idea from the start. It's their attempt to stop the defections of customers to Spotify et al. while at the same time trying to keep the iTunes store relevant and to minimize cannibalization of music sales.

 

[JuryDuty]

Apple Music is the Columbia House Record Club of the 2000s.

After you pay your $12 and get all the archived classic music you ever wanted in the first month, you're stuck paying for crappy new releases forever.

BJ

Except for the consumer, it's a much better deal. With Columbia House, every time I wanted a new album, I had to pay $15. Before streaming music, I easily bought 1-2 albums/month. Over time, my iTunes library grew to 10,000+ songs, all ripped from CD or bought from iTunes/Amazon.

But streaming changed all that for me. Yes, I'm locked into $10-$15/month, but I was spending that anyway. The difference is that now instead of having 10,000+ songs, I have millions--and I'm not locked into listening only where I have a CD player. I can listen anywhere I am at any moment.

 

[manu chao]

Between iTunes, Amazon Music, and Google Music, iTunes is usually not the cheapest. So why would I buy via iTunes?

Because you don't have to copy it over/import into iTunes from wherever Amazon Music or Google Music dumps the music files. Ditto for buying from an iOS device (which I don't know whether that is really possible). And if you buy stuff only in one store, you cannot (at least with the iTunes Store) buy songs accidentally that you already have bought before. You also don't need to give Google your payment details (if you use any iOS device, Apple already has your details for the App Store).

Those things might not matter enough to accept the price difference, but then looking for the cheapest version is an extra task in its own.

 

[Benjamin Frost]

Physical sales still bring as much revenue in as all digital distribution combined, with streaming making up approximately a third of the digital income.


View attachment 572045 View attachment 572046

So when all is said and done, 11.5% of revenue is from users actively paying for music streaming.

 

[Benjamin Frost]

Except for the consumer, it's a much better deal. With Columbia House, every time I wanted a new album, I had to pay $15. Before streaming music, I easily bought 1-2 albums/month. Over time, my iTunes library grew to 10,000+ songs, all ripped from CD or bought from iTunes/Amazon.

But streaming changed all that for me. Yes, I'm locked into $10-$15/month, but I was spending that anyway. The difference is that now instead of having 10,000+ songs, I have millions--and I'm not locked into listening only where I have a CD player. I can listen anywhere I am at any moment.

And if you think that paying for the equivalent of two albums a month for the rest of your life, with streaming costs possibly going up substantially, and with the music not always available or removed permanently, is fine with you, then go for it.