Let's talk about the steaming pile that is the Music App

[BillyMatt87]

My personal gripes with the Music app comes from the many taps and menus it takes to get to Curated Playlists not located in the For You tab for when I just want to discover some new great music (Spotify has this on lock whichever way with Discover Weekly and daily playlists that comes up on the home screen waiting for you and your music tastes). The New tab is always filled with hype tracks and while sometimes those are good, most of the time it's not, just hyped stuff Apple Music is pushing and I'm not interested. I wish that tab could be changed simply to Curated Playlists from the various publications they've gotten to create playlists. Secondly, these playlists are crazy short. My Spotify Discover Weekly playlist is over 90 minutes of new music, deep cuts, and old favs. Many of Apple's are 12 tracks that while may be cohesive, is done in about 30 minutes and you'll have to find another. That needs a change.

I find myself using Siri a lot to play things I know I want to hear so I don't even have to enter the Music app, which keeps me from being mad at it before I drive or when I'm lesson planning. Nonetheless, this app needs at the very least customization features to allow us to tailor it to what we want to see vs. what Apple thinks we want to see.

This is why the music app in its current state is a complete mess. Like the big banks, it should be broken up. The stock music app should be restored to its former glory, radio should be its own app and all the discovery and curation stuff could be integrated into the iTunes Store since they're essentially the same interface thus it's kinda redundant the way it is now.

 

[kiranmk2]

I'm gonna pull out the "Steve wouldn't have done that" card here because Steve did not like streaming music. He came from the LP era where owning and listening to records front to back was the best way to experience music.

While I agree that the Music app is dreadful I don't agree with this. While Steve didn't like streaming music, I would argue that iTunes did far more to destroy the idea of the album by allowing people to purchase individual (non-single released) tracks and popularised mass-shuffle listening. I think Steve would have similarly come aroung to streaming music (let's face it, the market seems to be going one way), but he certainly would have balked at the mass of tiny icons, inconsistant functionality and bad UI of the Music app.

 

[BillyMatt87]

While I agree that the Music app is dreadful I don't agree with this. While Steve didn't like streaming music, I would argue that iTunes did far more to destroy the idea of the album by allowing people to purchase individual (non-single released) tracks and popularised mass-shuffle listening. I think Steve would have similarly come aroung to streaming music (let's face it, the market seems to be going one way), but he certainly would have balked at the mass of tiny icons, inconsistant functionality and bad UI of the Music app.

Which is why we need a hawkish and perfectionist CEO like Jobs, not a visionless 'yes man' like Tim Cook. Jobs ran a tight ship, Tim is too lenient and carefree when it comes to quality control.