There are significant shortcomings in terms of the technical performance, design, and missing features that really hurt the experience for both groups. That’s a problem, as it makes the app feel like a collection of billboards, rather than a user-focused experience.Īnd for Group A people (of which I am one), the tools to be able to organize, sort, sift through, maintain, and play back a music library - are just sorely lacking and lead to a terrible experience. Apple and/or the record labels) wish to foist upon them. The curation often feels more like advertising, where the feature is less catered around what the end user wants, and more around what the content providers (i.e. And it’s worth noting that tapping the ‘Love’ hearts or the ‘Suggest Less Like This’ button is supposed to improve the suggestion algorithms, but it doesn’t seem to work very well in practice. They’ve improved over time, but they still have a long way to go. Whatever suggestion algorithms Apple uses just aren’t nearly as accurate as they ought to be. Most Group B people will tell you that Apple Music’s recommendations are simply not as good as Spotify’s. The result is that it provides a mediocre product to both Group A and Group B. It’s stuck in the middle, doing a sort of half-hearted job at both.

That’s not at all a denigrating term, rather, it simply points to the fundamental difference in how they consume music compared to Group A.Īpple Music is trying to appeal to both crowds and in my opinion, it doesn’t get either one right. Some would call them more casual listeners. Group B are those who are more oriented around radio stations, mix tapes, Top 40 hits, and of course, Spotify streams. They know exactly what they like, and while they enjoy suggestions and curation and recommendations to add to their library, they tend to listen to specific artists, specific albums, and specific songs, not simply music within a general style or overall genre.

The physical media are mostly gone, but the desire to collect and organize is not. Group A are the people who collected vinyl records/cassettes/CDs/iTunes libraries throughout their lives. Others prefer the streaming method, where they might have certain genres, styles of music, and even artists they enjoy, but they’re happy letting a curator (human or algorithmic) send them an endless stream of songs roughly based on their tastes. Some people like to collect hundreds, if not thousands of albums, organize them, maintain them, and play back the specific music they want to hear at that specific moment. There are two primary types of music listeners - those who maintain libraries and those who don’t.

If I could provide a 30,000 foot summary of what I see as the major problem inherent to Apple Music’s design, it’s that it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Here’s why the app is so controversial, has so many shortcomings, and what Apple can do to improve it. For a company with so many fantastic products and such high standards, the Apple Music app is a rare misstep.

It’s been a while since my 2017 list of Apple Music’s shortcomings, so it’s time for a 2021 update.Īs a music lover, longtime Apple fan, and design enthusiast, I really want to like this app, but it has so many problems, of both a design nature and a technical nature. Some of these flaws have been resolved, many haven’t, and some new ones have been introduced. In those 6 years, I’ve written extensively on Apple Music’s flaws - both big and small. In the 6+ years since Apple Music was released in June of 2015, it has been a controversial app, to put it mildly. Apple Music for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS are in rough shape.

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