Apple Music isn't turning out to be the revolution Apple made it out to be.
It's confusing, buggy, and extremely frustrating to use. Even Jim Dalrymple, a veteran Apple blogger for over 17 years who is usually buoyant about the company's products, torched the new music service in a Wednesday post, calling it a "nightmare."
Here's what he said:
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.
Apple needs to address some of these major issues in Apple Music, particularly those related to usability and syncing across devices. Hopefully, a major patch will release with iOS 9, Apple's new mobile software expected to launch in September.
But until Apple Music sees some huge changes, there's no reason to suffer through your three-month free trial of the service. Not when you could do much, much better, for the same monthly price (once your free trial ends).
It's a little app called Spotify.
Here are a few reasons why Spotify is better than Apple Music right now:
- Exploring and discovering new music is actually fun, since it's much easier to find music that fits your mood or style. No more random "introductions" to this artist you may or may not know. You won't see a disorganized mess of random albums when you click on the "For You" tab. No more relying on those pink bubbles with artists you might like, or that recommendation system where you have to "love" or "favorite" any song to inform the recommendation engine. Simply visit the "browse" option and get going, it couldn't be any simpler.
- Spotify has a much better system for getting your music on and off your devices. Find any music you're looking for — be it a song, an album, an artist, or an entire playlist — and you can add it to your saved music with a single click of a button. You can also instantly add it to a playlist, and if that playlist is toggled for "offline listening," all you need to do is launch Spotify on any device and you'll see those songs magically download. Apple Music's system is similar, but here's the most important difference: It's extremely easy to see which songs, albums and playlists are available offline. In Apple Music, it's common that you won't see your albums appear in playlists on other devices until you toggle the "Show Music Available Offline" option, which is hidden in a menu under "My Music." Everything should just work as it does on Spotify. Take notes, Apple!
- Everything is intuitive. If you click on any artist or album, you'll be taken right to their catalog; not so on Apple Music. There's one sidebar with all your music, playlists, and menu options. Apple Music's menu options make it difficult to find what you're looking for on your first click: Maybe what you're looking for is under "My Music," or perhaps it's in "For You," or "New." And when you add music to Spotify, nothing gets lost. In Apple Music, it's common to have several tracks of an album suddenly missing for no reason at all.
For these above reasons and so many more, Spotify Premium should be the obvious choice when it comes to music streaming. Of course, everyone wanted to give Apple Music a fair shake, considering Apple is the biggest tech company in the world and its previous inventions — the iPod and the iTunes Store — transformed how we buy and enjoy music. But at the moment, it's Spotify, not Apple, that demonstrates it understands how people want to enjoy music.
Spotify's interface is intuitive, the playlists are unique and easy to find, and even the social features — you can see what your friends are listening to and share your listening experience with others — are leagues better than Apple's "Connect" feature, which encourages artists to share content like they would on Twitter or Instagram. "Connect" is almost a clone of Apple's defunct social network called "iTunes Ping" that debuted in 2010, but there's a reason Ping was a failure: It didn't understand what music listeners want. This is where Apple Music, as a whole, needs to improve.
Apple Music may succeed in the long run, but right now, choosing the best streaming music application should be a no-brainer. It's Spotify. You can try your first three months of Spotify Premium for $0.99.
