Just spotted on one of our reviewers' Facebook page: a music fan has written "so long Spotify, it was good while it lasted." Time will tell -- specifically three months of time, as that's how long Apple's giving for free -- but we're already impressed with
Apple Music. Not so impressed, however, with the expected problem of it being difficult to download the necessary updates while everyone else in the world was trying to grab them too. Actively disappointed with the
unexpected issues facing some unknown number of iTunes Match users, as well. Yet in terms of what Apple Music does, and what it's like, we actually are impressed.
Right now we're listening to "Modern Love" on our iPhones having said "hey, Siri, play the
Let's Dance album by David Bowie." That's rather cool. Sometimes Siri says righto, got that, here you are, and shows that it's playing what you asked for -- but you don't hear it. That doesn't happen all the time, and we can't see a pattern, nor reliably reproduce it. It's obviously a slight pain, but more annoying is that there's also always an Open Music button, and that does not take you to the track or artist as you'd expect.
Instead, it opens the Music app, and shows you the last screen you were looking at. Navigating back and forth through Apple Music could be easier: you find something you're interested in, and then when you nip off to find something else and change your mind, you end up having to search anew.
"Hey, Siri, play 'The Valley Road' by Bruce Hornsby and the Range." One day we will get used to this Star Trek-like feature, but it won't be today. This is a new toy, and you find yourself stretching your music memory to dig out tracks you haven't got but suspect Apple Music will. "Hey, Siri, play music by the Kids from Fame."
We didn't say we had taste. Well, we didn't say we had
your taste.
Does it help our street cred that we've moved on to the Cocteau Twins? Now Meredith Brooks? Howard Jones? "Hey, Siri, play some 70s music." Maybe we should've amended that to "play some 70s music we've ever heard of." Now a general request for Cyndi Lauper has turned up a really gorgeous little-known track called "Sally's Pigeons." This is a deep search, and it's done quickly, it's done well, and it's done across a gigantic music collection.
You have to worry for the future and how new acts will ever make it when we don't have a way to find them -- except, hang on, there is Beats 1. The 24-hour music station began about one hour after the new Apple Music service started, and it's good if you like that sort of thing. Some of us are in the UK, where we have heard of Zane Lowe, we just weren't fussed about him: he's a DJ. It's going to interest me more when Beats 1 has musicians and artists presenting the shows but, to be fair, there are brilliant artists who are dreadful radio hosts.
Lowe talks like he's standing up, bouncing around, and his excitement about the station being live is more appealing than his initial music is. That's an unfair and very easy comment to make, because the first radio station we tuned into on Apple Music was the BBC World Service, so there's a chance we're not the Beats 1's target audience here.
Radio is hard, though. Radio is
really hard. If Lowe and the others can pull this off, they will make a deeply personal connection to listeners, and that is something Spotify hasn't got. Plenty of radio stations have it, but none have it worldwide, and that's what Apple is in with a chance of pulling off.
With all respect to the doubtlessly many, many people needed to get Beats 1 running, it does all come down to Lowe and fellow presenters Ebro Darden and Julie Adenuga, because it has to. Music radio has to be personal on both ends, chosen and presented by individuals, and aimed at the individual listening. Beats 1 has a chance, and very good luck to it.
We'd just like to see a Beats 2 that did the same for spoken word. Imagine an NPR or a BBC that isn't so constrained by finances. Apple could do that, and it would be stunningly difficult to do right, but stunningly gorgeous if they do. It's both an impressive and a rather sad fact that right now there isn't any other company that could do Beats 1, let alone our fancied Beats 2.
You shouldn't bet against there being a Samsung Music next Tuesday, but you shouldn't get excited about the prospect either. We're talking as if Apple Music is the only contender in town, and we're a bit shocked to hear ourselves. We've used Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, some of us have used Beats Music, many of us have used the old iTunes Radio, yet this feels new. We're less than a day into it, we're barely a few hours into it, and we realize we're seeing Apple Music as the one to beat.
It wasn't like that immediately. It took a few minutes. Our very first experience in setting it up on our iPhones and iPads was confusing. There's a point in the setup where you're told that since you already have music on your device, you can choose to merge that with Apple Music, or replace it all with the new service. There's no third option, no we'll-think-about-it-and-get-back-to-you-later. In a very un-Apple way, it's both unclear and has no way out. We went for merge, and suspect it was the right choice, but we don't know.
We also don't know why we got some errors, saying we couldn't have music on our other devices and couldn't save music for offline listening, because we hadn't set up iCloud Music. Isn't that what we were just doing?
"Hey, Siri, play music by Suzanne Vega." Honestly, we don't even want to get used to this, it is far too much fun.
It is a little less fun setting up what music we like. You get a bouncy series of circles that initially have broad genres like country, metal and so on. Tap once on something you like, tap twice if you love it, tap and hold if you never want to hear that stuff ever again, thank you. Then you get artists, and you do the same thing: tap on ones you like from a sample selection, and it will refine what the service will offer you. Yet it really wants you to have liked or loved three artists, and we went through page after page thinking well, we liked that hit they had once, is that enough?
Eventually we made a mistake, and said we hate Kate Bush. Any music service worth its salt and any human being in the world should know that is a mistake, but we had to hit Reset to fix it -- and that reset all our selections.
The result of all this selecting and then re-selecting was that on our iPhones we have a "For You" section which had a few sample artists. Just a few: we're not clear why only the barest handful are there. We have a Mary Chapin Carpenter sampler in our selection too, and she's a fine artist, we're happy with that, but her name didn't even appear in the sample list, so we're not clear why we got her instead of, say, Kate Bush.
We're far from unhappy with having her in our library -- go on, ask Siri to "play 'He Thinks He'll Keep Her' by Mary Chapin Carpenter" -- but it means we went off randomly exploring more than digging into what Apple Music thinks we like.
That's perhaps especially so because of Connect, the feature that has you following artists. We're apparently following 103 of them, which was news to us, but you can understand setting up a few to get the idea going, and you can understand anyone being overzealous. However, go into the Connect section, and we were shown three artists that we do quite like, but are not especially giant fans of -- and those three are not ones we're following. Apple Music adds artists that you've asked for, as well, which means we soon had Dar Williams on our Follow list, but we couldn't get into any section to see if she'd done something. Connect doesn't always seem connected to artist pages.
Yet speaking of Williams, Apple Music includes a video of hers we've been trying to find for ages. It's oddly cropped at the start, the video kicks in just a frame and a beat late, but it was a treat to see it.
All exploring is a treat when you ask for it, and go hunting. It's a little less so when you're typing, or at least it is on the iPhone 5. The layout of album art, play/pause and so on is familiar from all the other streaming services, but sometimes the buttons are bit small. When it's played a few tracks, we can't always find the current song on the album's listing, and that's perplexing.
There's a lot that is perplexing, and at first we had the feeling that this was our old iTunes music app with some bits of iTunes Radio in it. It took a while to appreciate just how broad this is, and also how unlike iTunes Radio and unlike the free version of Spotify it is; you can play any track the service has (almost), and you can play albums in order.
Once we got that, and once we had rather surrendered to Apple Music, we liked it. We'd say love, but come on, the paint's still wet, let's take this affair a little slow for a time: we've got three months of dating before we have to make a commitment.
Apple Music requires iOS 8.4 or OS X 10.10.4, and is free for three months. Thereafter it will be $10 per month for individuals, or $15 month for a family of up to six people (each with their own entirely separate account, that's nice). What are the odds that family pack will sell the best? Probably about the same odds that we're going to see rivals doing the same thing as soon as they can.
Who is Apple Music for:
So far, just about everybody. It works, and it works well bar some minor first-day issues, so the rest is down to your liking the music, which is rather up to you.
Who is Apple Music not for:
Very tricky. There will be more obscure tracks you can't get -- and no Beatles -- and that is important. If you only ever listen to vinyl, you're not even reading this far. Or if any music subscription just isn't worth it to you, then this one won't be either.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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