Jim Dalrymple at The Loop has had some scathing issues with Apple Music. My thoughts below.
I love Apple. I love them because they take difficult problems and come up with innovative, simple solutions. The things they make just work and we trust them. Unfortunately, my experience with Apple Music has been exactly the opposite. As of today, I’m missing about 4,700 songs from my library with little hope of getting them back.
I had high hopes for Apple Music. I really wanted it to work and become my default music streaming service, but after the problems I’ve experienced over the last couple of weeks, I’m disabling it altogether
I had mediocre hopes for apple music. A lot of my friends at work and at Tekside are raving about it. But, it's a service. A web/cloud/backend service. Apple historically has sucked at these. (Ping, iCloud sync, iMessage still isn't perfect).
This isn't a review because as I'm still playing with it. But I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who has used Spotify for years. I've commented a few times that I've been delighted at the new music their weekly newsletter recommends for me. I end up LOVING about 80% of them and they get discography playlists. (Unless I'm listening to trance or classical I make discography playlists for every band I listen to. I usually listen to them in order. It never been one for a more traditionally playlist or shuffling different bands on a play. I like to listen to albums, the way they were destined to be listened to.
What I'm trying to get at, is Apple is coming to me at a high bar. Their music service can't be good, or even great. It has to knock my socks off. It has to make me love it. It has to make me want to go through the trouble of canceling my Spotify subscription and recreate the way I listen to music in it's ecosystem
I don't have to worry too much about music I've purchased. I went from Napster to Pandora to Spotify. There are a few bands that I own the music for the I've added to Spotify (looking at you Beatles and Tool)
Also, EVERYONE at work is on Spotify and playlists are passed around all the time. It will be interesting to see how his shakes out. (I've been home on paternity leave so I'm not sure what's going on with Apple music over there)
As if all of that wasn’t enough, Apple Music gave me one more kick in the head. Over the weekend, I turned off Apple Music and it took large chunks of my purchased music with it. Sadly, many of the songs were added from CDs years ago that I no longer have access to. Looking at my old iTunes Match library, before Apple Music, I’m missing about 4,700 songs. At this point, I just don’t care anymore, I just want Apple Music off my devices.
I trusted my data to Apple and they failed. I also failed by not backing up my library before installing Apple Music. I will not make either of those mistakes again.
I'm assuming Apple Music uses cloudkit. I'm hoping it does. If it uses iCloud sync, it's screwed. I've seen how that works. Heck I've built apps that use it so I know its shortcomings. I have little trust in apples cloud ability
Beats1 alone is not enough to take my money. But we will see how I use it over the next month. I'll be exclusively using it to give it an honest try
But, here's another thing. This launch had to be flawless. This has Apple and some of the biggest names in music behind it. Hearing repeat content within the first few days on Beats1 is inexcusable. Losing music is horrid. And downtime if such a high profile service is even worse.
All 3 of these things have happened. "It's a new service" is not an excuse for this. This isn't some startup or kickstater project. This is Apple and while they didn't trip out of the gate, it wasn't far behind