Apple Music, which offered a free three-month trial, impressed me with a solid experience. I use an iPhone and a Mac, so the apps are just sitting there, and in terms of user experience it’s not actually a massive change. The service has a good-enough desktop app (it could definitely be a lot better, but so could Spotify’s); it has a simple-enough mobile app with support for Android (essential for me, as I review quite a few Android devices); and a large music library.
Aaron Souppouris, writing in Engadget, makes a good case for leaving Spotify. As far as I am concerned, Spotify versus Apple Music was a case of six of one and half a dozen of another. But I cancelled Spotify and moved over the Apple Music simply because it fits more comfortably into the Apple ecosystem and my use of iPhone, iPad and Mac.
I’ve been using Music for a few months now. I love it. I can get just about anything I want. Also, I like the recommendations part. When I was younger, I knew every song and musical group (well, almost), but I’ve lost touch with the music scene. Music suggests current songs I don’t know about, and I enjoy that feature quite a bit. The app is easy to learn and I haven’t had any difficulty with sharing among my devices.
I agree Phyllis. A happy new year to you and Bob. Michael
Music became commoditised some time back. Therefore, streaming, of whatever persuasion, might seem to make sense. I am not sure what exactly streaming playlists are but I suspect that they are some way of playing one’s favourite music over and over again using a list system. My favourite music is jazz, including the music which was made long before the concept of an album came about. The important thing for jazz enthusiasts is to identify who is playing. With the breakthroughs made by Louis Armstrong and others in the 1920s, jazz became a music for soloists which has continued up to the present day and, therefore, it is important to jazz fans to identify who is playing not only the solos but also the accompanists as well. This type of relevant information is entirely missing from streaming services and would be, I suspect, much more important to jazz fans than playlists. I use an online discography produced by Tom Lord https://www.lordisco.com to which I pay an annual subscription. Now, if somebody could find a way of linking the two concepts whereby you could go directly from the online discography to streamed music, then you would have my idea of a ‘sensible playlist’. It won’t happen, of course, as the market is not there to justify such a system. Jazz is very much a minority music these days.
The other issue which I have with all digital music is that the compression and other tampering involved definitely makes the sound much worse, subjectively speaking of course, than the LPs I first bought 45 years ago. As for my 78s ……
There are a lot of other issues about quality v quantity and ‘you can only listen to so much’ and the concept of ‘ownership’ but I’ll leave it that. Currently, I am using the full (no ads) version of Spotify which I got free with a 4G mobile subscription. Since I got this, I have not bought any musical item from iTunes but I have bought some CDs.
And here’s me thinking moving from Spotify to Apple Music was a simple thing. I stand corrected.
How are you moving your playlists?
Short answer is that I didn’t. I’m not a big music listener and I realised I didn’t have any play lists that I could not easily reproduce (mainly classical music, so easier). I agree it is a problem for those with a lot of time and effort invested in playlists. In fact, one of my friends has decided to stay with Spotify after the one-year free trial. That is clearly a factor in any switch to Apple Music. All that said, I did google playlist transfer about the time Apple Music was announced and I seem to remember there are some routines that can be adopted–none of them, however, 100% accurate or completely automatic.