I’ve used Spotify and Pandora, but I’m preferring Apple Music by a lot. Reasons in no particular order:
There are a lot of playlists set up for a lot of artists and these are interesting even if you really, really know the artist. For example, the Belle & Sebastian basic playlist is great and gives a real sense of what they do.
This extends across genres. I love opera and they have wonderful playlists for composers and genres. They have a lot of classical playlists. I'm listening to Bach Cantatas right now and it's a very good assortment.
The For You section has a lot of interesting ideas and New can be really cool. Again, lots of set up playlists but also very easy to get into any form of music you want from pretty much anywhere.
It's extremely easy to search, both on the phone or the computer. My wife uses kids music at school and gave me a few songs to look up. It had multiple versions of each.
It's extremely easy to add music to your own music. You can leave it in the cloud or you can download it. You can't rip it to CD - same with Spotify, Pandora, etc. (I say that knowing how it can be done but people generally can't.)
Beats radio can be cool. It really is DJ driven and I particularly like some of the later night shows and the ones by various music makers.
I'm sharing it with my kids so the $15 (after free trial) isn't much for all of us.
A few thoughts. First, I wonder if people will buy anything when you can find anything so easily and putting it your device’s memory is simple (meaning you can have your playlists and favorites, whether in the cloud or downloaded). Second, I looked at the economics of the US recording industry. RIAA puts out a yearly breakdown and it shows 2014 was at about $4.7B in wholesale revenue, with that almost evenly divided between physical sales, digital sales and streaming (with sales for TV, ads, movies - “synchronization” - being about 3%). BTW, ad supported streaming was a relative pittance.
I don’t think of AM as a “Spotify killer” but as ways in which the streaming market can grow. Spotify says they have 20 million paying members worldwide - but they lose money and don’t say how many are in the US and thus what they make from most of those paying members. But if the various streaming services can get to 40+ million paid, that essentially replaces the entire US wholesale market (assuming some are $15 family plans). That means there’s room for long-term growth, which is good news.
I would worry if I’m Sirius because the next step is for cars to have cellular connections or some other way to connect so we don’t use our data plans, though those are (finally) getting larger. I’ve never enjoyed Sirius’ stations. As wifi gets more common and cell data plans get bigger …
I remember the original iPod being introduced as “x thousand songs in your pocket”, which was a huge jump up from carrying around a cd or a tape to play on a Walkman type thing. But subscription services didn’t make sense until we had faster wifi and the iPhone made apps really usable and then when data plans became less horribly expensive and restrictive. As a note, I have 10GB - 11 with some bonus - that my family shares and I can make it 15GB for $20 more.
I just signed up for a trial. I use my iPhone to listen to music when I drive. I am on the fence about the ease of use because I can’t easily access my own library anymore unless Siri listens to my commands.
That I need to figure out , but I DO like the way it functions when I play a genre and it plays music that I don’t own.
It is probably my clumsiness with technology making it difficult
I’m still old school. I buy off iTunes and when I want a particular song, I want that song and I want to specify the order in which the songs play. I’ve tried Pandora and Spotify, but a service without Beatles is unacceptable to me, and I don’t want to not specify the song orders. So iTunes it has been for me. What can Apple Music do for me?
I love radio the way it was when I was in college. That’s why I still love my XM radio. I use Pandora if I absolutely have no other music around, but it’s not my preference. I love to hear knowledgeable DJs talk and their interviews and chatter with musicians, and to hear music that I’d otherwise never get exposed to. I also avoid the Apple universe so there’s absolutely no interest whatsoever in any Apple streaming service.
Thing about Apple Music is it works seamlessly with iTunes, at least as I’ve found. If I search, two buttons appear: “My Library” and “Apple Music”. Click one. The Beatles, like some other acts, don’t let anyone stream - though there is a Beatles “radio” station - but there is a vast library of classic rock and a number of set up playlists. You can easily add these to your music and play with the order.
I was thinking at the gym how much I disliked the music Spotify was playing - like 1 of 5 songs. Part of that is the way it lets you choose which artists and types you want to hear then, but part of it was that it was just the top level stuff from bands like Muse instead of a more interesting selection. I spent some time with my brother in his car recently and his easy listening pop choices pulled up 3 different versions of the same Bacharach/David song, which I thought really odd and wrong.
Oh, to get to your own library on your phone, it’s the My Music button on the right. Touch it. Opens up to “Library/Playlists” buttons. Touch playlists and it’s all the ones you’ve set up. You can choose how the Library sorts: album, artist, genre.
BTW, they archive episodes of radio shows, so I’m listening to Dre’s The Pharmacy show now. He’s good at the DJ stuff.
I’m concerned about reports that Apple Music can mess up your iTunes library. If you’ve spent a lot of time tweaking it, like I have, that would be a big problem.
I’ve done a couple of coast to coast road trips where I used mostly XM radio the first time (because I was still in the free trial period) and streaming music over my iPhone (with unlimited data plan) the second time.
I prefer the streaming and agree that Sirius/XM s/b concerned about the technology.
The reason I preferred the streaming is that I have a lot more choice and I found that I tired of the choices on XM fairly quickly - the choices are pretty limited on XM/Sirius. For streaming I use Pandora, Aha, iHeartRadio, Apple Music streaming, and there are many more options. I don’t pay anything for these apps - they’re all no cost.
I was actually quite surprised at how good the reception via the iPhone was on the cross country trips (AT&T wireless). These trips were via various routes but on freeways the reception tends to be excellent, even in the boonies, and the switching between cell towers completely transparent. There were a few areas with some issues - mostly ‘some’ mountainous areas. I really expected the cell reception and/or streaming consistency to be a much bigger issue than it was. Of course, satellite reception is better but not good enough to incur the cost to have it along with the limited selection of choices.
For ‘Novadad’, iHeartRaidio is streaming radio stations so you get to hear all the DJ, etc. chatter. I routinely listen to station WMAL which is on the other end of the country from me.
“I’m concerned about reports that Apple Music can mess up your iTunes library. If you’ve spent a lot of time tweaking it, like I have, that would be a big problem.”
That would be a biggie for me. What kinds of problems have you heard about?
I guess I’m asking - if right now, I buy songs I hear off iTunes (often after using Shazam to identify the song/artist), and then I put them in playlists that suit my needs, what does Apple Music do for me? I’m ok with the idea that if I like XYZ songs/artists, I might like ABC songs/artists - but to me, Pandora and Spotify did too much of the branching out and I still want to be grounded in the songs I want to hear, with occasional forays into new, if that makes sense.
My spending on iTunes is variable. Some months I might buy nothing or just one song at $1.29, other months I might buy an album or two. (Album. See how vintage I am here?) Is there a certain calculus that if I’m spending $x per month I’m better off with Apple Music than iTunes?
I’m not happy that my iTunes library of purchased music is oddly classified. A lot of my music has now been thrown into " Pop " including some of what I would consider classic rock and / or alternative .I have some songs from the Clash for instance. To me , that is either punk or new wave…but pop ? No , just no. Talking heads also ( depending on songs show up in both pop and alternative. It is harder to play my music on shuffle because sometimes Siri doesn’t want to listen to me
Turns out the issue with iTunes was with iTunes Match subscribers only. They released a new version of iTunes that fixed it for all but a few with really odd circumstances. Gist is that when you turn on iCloud Music Library - which you don’t have to do to use Music - it sends data about each track and a problem arose in the way MacOSX and iOS identify tracks, with iOS using a simpler tag method. It was a metadata mismatch issue that was a problem for tracks added from a phone - because those had lesser metadata - and specifically for some iTunes Match customers. I’m not sure why that mattered but my guess is it’s a larger version of the metadata mismatching and thus misidentifying. This was a sometimes problem with iTunes Match before: it would misclassify. Should not be a problem now - unless you have a ton of libraries that you synch variously - and is not a problem in general.
I believe the issue with purchased music is that’s how Apple classifies. I haven’t seen a change in anything I’ve genre classified or picked up along the way.
Only hard to understand thing I’ve run into is that adding a playlist to My Music means I have to play it from My Music not from Apple Music. I can understand the programming rationale but I didn’t expect that.
Pizzagirl - Clear Channel was the behemoth that bought up a large chunk of the airwaves, resulting in a homogenous product which was bland, devoid of originality, or basically the antithesis of FM freeform or Album Oriented Rock of the 70s, which is what I grew up on. Their music playlists were very limited and seems to play the same songs over and over again. Pretty much any unique local market quirkiness was done away with and replaced by corporate conformity. Here in the DC market, FM radio is pretty much a wasteland. I drive 4 hours a day for my commute and I can only keep my sanity with NPR and XM satellite radio.
I have a huge iTunes library, including many, many songs that I ripped from my own CDs, and I’ve changed a lot of the information for many of the tracks–like changing the genre, fixing composers so they’re alphabetical by last name, etc. I really don’t want to have any of that messed up.
Clear Channel has been big on test generated playlists. They gather a few hundred people in a room, play them snippets of songs for a few hours, ask for a rating on each song, and pay something for that.
I’ve found an issue in Apple Music: a playlist I saved to My Music became unplayable. I had to delete it and then it became playable again in Apple Music. I think in this case it may be because I accidentally added it on both my phone and my laptop and that caused metadata confusion.