“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.”
My library isn’t as large as yours (maybe only 1,000 songs), and all of mine are from iTunes rather than my own CD’s, but I, too, have specific versions of songs that I don’t want messed up – for example, having Apple Music override a mono with a stereo (which appears to happen with Beatles songs), or override different versions bearing the same name that might have appeared on live albums or greatest hits albums. I think I don’t really want to hear new music badly enough to mess with my iTunes library and playlist; I get a lot of new music through just listening to the radio and Shazaming what I hear to find a new artist.
It’s a shame - the advantage of Apple Music over Pandora / Spotify should be that I don’t have to thumbs-up/ thumbs-down every song that I hear because it should already know my taste because it’s in my library. I’ve tried to “create new station” from certain songs and it invariably tells me that there’s not enough plays to create a station. I want it to create a new station based on the totality of my music, or at least some significant subset.
I have about 12,000 songs, but more stuff in terms of length because I have a lot of classical works that have long parts.
The issue I had with the Apple Music Playlist was my fault: I had been playing with an illegal app a nephew showed me and forgot to delete it. Screwed up synching. Now it’s fine.
Apple Music Playlists added to My Music appear at the top clearly labeled.
Novadad:
I pretty much only listen to talk radio on iHeart and it’s fine for what I want to listen to when I want to listen to talk radio and for that I use a station in your area, 2700 miles from me, because I like what’s on there better than what’s on my local station.
For music I tend to listen to Apple streaming music, Pandora, Aha, Accuradio, and some others - all streaming content at no additional cost although there are some (very limited number of ) commercials. I don’t really listen to FM or AM anymore unless I’m driving my (very) old car that has only an AM radio.
The times have changed since the 70s and the whole landscape is different and IMO better. The problem with the album plays of the 70s was that if you’re not interested in that artist you were out of luck - the music channel was locked out for an hour or worse, many hours when they got on an inane Beatles (or other group) marathon (I still can’t stand listening to the Beatles since they’ve been so overplayed - especially in the album plays and marathons). There were maybe one or two other FM channels to switch to in some areas but likely not many more than that who played the type of music any one person really wanted to listen to - harder rock, light rock, jazz, country, pop, oldies, etc.
Now we have much more choice. We can very easily and readily buy individual songs rather than entire albums (often filled with undesirable tracks), play them whenever we want through a convenient means on our person, through our computers, in the car, and better yet, with streaming we can get almost any kind of content we’re interested in - even if it’s from a source in the next county, state, across the country, or a foreign country. We’re no longer stuck with maybe a couple of local terrestrial stations we might want to listen to or worse, none in some parts of the drive where no channels come in.
If you have an ax to grind with Clearchannel you likely can find other sources for streaming radio stations you’re interested in unless you think none exist anymore.