Happiness in Slavery?
Confession: I Actually Quite Like Apple Music…
Two separate reports today suggest that Apple Music is on the verge of a major overhaul. And not a moment too soon because… Wait a minute. Am I literally the only person who actually quite likes Apple Music?
I’ve been thinking about this for the better part of a year, as I’ve seen basically non-stop complaints about it. Is Apple Music perfect? Of course not. But is it awful? No. Instead, I find it to be a fairly robust streaming music offering that picks up for me where Rdio left off. So am I crazy?
When I posed this question to a few people with vastly more knowledge of such things, the refrain was the same: you probably like it because you don’t care too much about your legacy iTunes music collection. That’s absolutely true. While I have thousands of songs in my library obtained through legacy means,¹ and I think I even still pay to have them hosted in the cloud, I don’t explicitly try to access them anymore. Instead, when I’m looking for music, I simply search through all of Apple Music and figure anything that was a part of my library will also be a part of Apple’s expansive library, to which I now have full access.
Yes, I know there are exceptions. And yes, I understand that some people really, really, really want to own their music. But I don’t care, I just want to be able to access any song I want — whether I previously purchased it or not — whenever I want. Apple Music provides this. So I’m happy.
Again, it’s not perfect. The “Connect” tab seems useless to me — quit trying to make Ping happen — and I never click on it. “My Music” could be more streamlined. But in general, I really like the “Radio” functionality, and am still a fan of Beats 1. And I love the “For You” tab, which is how I predominantly use the service.
I’ve heard a lot of buzz around Spotify’s new personalized playlists, which sounds a lot like the curated playlists “My Music” offer, though I guess more personalized. But try as I might, I’ve never been able to get into Spotify. There’s just something aesthetically I don’t like about it. Hence, Rdio (RIP).
So I guess I’m just always surprised when I hear how adamantly people dislike Apple Music. Perhaps even to the point of Apple overhauling the service just a year in — though, to be fair, Apple basically revamps most of their software each year, no? I guess I’m happy about more of a focus on artwork. And this whole black & white thing seems on-trend with the Instagram changes in testing. It will be cool not to have to Google for lyrics, I suppose. I just hope they don’t get rid of the things I quite like and use on a daily basis.
Which is blasphemy, apparently. Because Apple Music is the worst thing Apple has ever done. For reasons still not clear to me.
¹ Be it through ripping, buying, or other, less couth methods.
