Apple Music and Spotify are the top two players in the music streaming game.
But the services have very different histories, which has influenced everything from their
feature sets to their user interfaces, with most people having a preference for one service
or the other.
And in this video, I’m going to explain how Apple Music has evolved to become a serious
competitor to Spotify, despite Apple entering the market seven years later.
This is Greg with Apple Explained and I want to thank NordVPN for sponsoring this video.
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So as you probably know, I’m a big Apple fan.
But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the shortcomings of their products and services.
And when Apple Music was released in 2015, there were a lot of issues with its navigation
and performance.
For example, there was no button to simply shuffle all the music from one artist.
Instead, you’d have to create a playlist, manually add every album from a particular
artist, navigate to the playlist you just created, and then shuffle it.
And as you can see here, that was a minimum 14 step process compared to four steps with
Spotify.
But don’t take it from me, Business Insider said Apple Music had the worst received product
launch since Apple Maps in 2012.
Mainly because all of the bugs and technical issues users were experiencing.
One person who expressed their frustrations with Apple Music was Jim Dalrymple with The
Loop.
He wrote, “I love Apple.
I love them because they take difficult problems and come up with innovative, simple solutions.
The things they make just work and we trust them.
Unfortunately, my experience with Apple Music has been exactly the opposite.
As of today, I’m missing about 4,700 songs from my library with little hope of getting
them back.”
He continued on, discussing problems he had like adding compilations and albums.
Many of which were missing songs since those singles were already in his library, and Apple
Music was trying to prevent duplicates.
He actually had add the missing songs to fifteen albums manually, only to discover they had
been deleted by Apple Music the following day.
When trying to add a ZZTop album to his library, Apple Music decided to download the songs
from multiple albums.
So he was stuck will multiple ZZTop albums, each with only a few songs.
But all of those headaches paled in comparison to what happened when Dalrymple tried to stop
using Apple Music.
It turned out that when he turned off the service, it took 4,700 of his songs with it.
Many of which were added from CDs that he no longer had access to.
So although this was only one person’s story, it’s important to understand that Dalrymple
represented thousands of users who experienced similar bugs with Apple Music.
And that’s why Apple Music received so many critical reviews after it launched back in
2015.
I remember reading headlines like this one from cnet which read, “Apple's do-it-all
music app has big potential (and some problems).”
Writers often praised the huge music catalog and the service’s integration with Siri,
but then criticize its confusing navigation and unreliable features like the iCloud Music
Library.
And after using Apple Music myself back in 2015, I remember feeling disappointed.
The connect feature was simply a reimplementation of Ping, a failed social network added to
iTunes in 2010, and discontinued two years later.
And as it would turn out, Apple Music’s connect saw the exact same fate.
The feature was rarely used and after three years was discontinued altogether.
But one of my biggest problems with Apple Music was its slow navigation and poor music
discovery.
The app was simply slower than Spotify.
It took longer to launch, took longer to search, and took longer for a song to buffer.
And this is likely due to it being integrated with iTunes, which was perhaps one of the
biggest mistakes Apple made when creating the service.
And when it came to discovering new music, I was shocked at just how little Apple Music
offered.
Spotify had a weekly playlist with singles picked just for me, full of songs that I actually
liked.
Apple tried something similar with Discovery Mix, but its algorithm was underdeveloped
and rarely suggested songs I was interested in.
Spotify also curated daily mix playlists that featured songs I already liked with similar
new songs that I might like.
But Apple Music had nothing like this back in 2015, and I was stuck listening to artist
radios to try and discover new music.
Finally, as I mentioned at the beginning of the video, I found navigating Apple Music
to be very unintuitive.
Not only did tapping on an artist name in album view not take me to the artist’s page,
but the way Apple organized music was unnecessarily complicated.
They actually separated your music library from Apple Music itself.
So when you searched for a song, you had to specify whether you were searching your existing
music library, or all songs on Apple Music.
And tapping one or the other was something that annoyed me every time I searched for
something.
It made the experience unnecessarily complicated.
Just consider how searching for music worked on Spotify.
You simply typed in a song, album, or artist, and began playing your choice of music.
If that music happened to be in your library, Spotify would play it from your library.
If it wasn’t, then the song was simply played from the album or artist page that you selected.
It was a seamless, straightforward experience that users didn’t even have to think about.
But for some reason Apple couldn’t replicate that experience on their own platform and
it’s a problem that still hasn’t been fixed today.
Another problem that hasn’t been fixed is Apple Music’s lack of continuity between
devices.
If I’m listening to a song on my iPhone, I can’t pick up where I left off on my Mac.
Which is odd since app continuity has existed on Apple's products since 2014.
But the good news is Apple has fixed many of the issues with their streaming service
since its launch in 2015, which has made it much more competitive with other services
like Spotify.
First, in 2016, complaints were addressed about Apple Music’s unintuitive navigation
with a user interface refresh in iOS 10.
Apple tweaked the look and functionality of Apple Music which made the platform easier
to use.
The update featured more white space, larger and bolder fonts, and a reorganized navigation
bar that offered useful functions.
For example, the ‘Connect’ social network feature that very few people used was removed
from the navigation bar.
In addition to ‘New,’ which featured random recently released tracks and playlists, and
‘My Music,’ which separated your streaming library from your playlists in a very confusing
way.
In place of those tabs, Apple added ‘Library,’ ‘Browse,’ and ‘Search.’
Which were much more functional since users navigated to those pages more often than ‘Connect’
or ‘New.’
I should also mention that in 2018 Apple removed the ‘Connect’ feature from Apple Music
altogether.
Which just goes to show that no one is interested in a social media platform for music.
Not in 2010 with Ping, and not in 2015 with Connect.
But one of the best things Apple did to improve Apple Music came back in June, with the announcement
that iTunes would be discontinued.
Something that people like me have been looking forward to for years.
And why is that exactly?
Well, iTunes has become a bloated, slow, resource-heavy application that many users avoid opening
as much as possible.
And Craig Federighi actually joked about this on stage [clip]
So by rebuilding a new application for the Mac called Music, Apple’s streaming service
will finally launch quickly and load pages faster.
But Apple took things to a new level that many people, myself included, were not expecting.
Just last month on September 5th, it was revealed that Apple Music would be getting a web player.
Which means, like Spotify, you’ll be able to access the service from web browsers like
Safari or Chrome without the need for a dedicated app.
And I must admit, even though the player is still in beta, it performs much better than
the dedicated iTunes app ever did.
Now although all the updates of Apple Music over the past four years have definitely improved
the service, it’s worth discussing why many of those changes weren’t made before Apple
Music was released in the first place.
Just consider how many big names were involved in its creation: Jimmy Iovine, co-founder
of Interscope records and Beats, Dr. Dre, Trent Reznor, and of course all of the talented
executives and engineers at Apple.
And despite all of that brainpower, Apple Music debuted as a streaming service that
underdelivered in almost every category.
Speed, ease of use, music discovery, and library management.
In fact, I think the service’s shortcomings were a result of too many big names being
involved in its development.
Apple Music was simply trying to do too much.
It was trying to be a music streaming and discovery service like Spotify, it was trying
to be a traditional radio station by integrating Beats One, and it was trying to be a social
media platform with the Connect feature.
By pushing Apple Music is so many directions at once, its key purpose of simply listening
to music sort’ve felt like an afterthought.
So despite its rough launch in 2015, Apple has definitely focused their attention on
all the right areas to ensure Apple Music’s steady improvement year after year.
And although Spotify has always been my go-to music streaming app, that may soon change
as Apple Music becomes more appealing.
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