Apple Music is one of the most popular music streaming services out there
and whether you're brand new to Apple Music, music streaming in general,
or you're familiar with it, but you want to expand your knowledge,
I can promise you this, you're definitely going to learn something in this video.
So let's dive in. And first, let me address what Apple Music is, and more importantly,
what it is not. Apple Music is a music streaming service where you pay
a monthly fee to listen to and download an unlimited amount of music with no ads. Now,
what's different with Apple Music if you're familiar with purchasing music through something
like iTunes is, if you download music from Apple Music while you're subscribed to it
and then you unsubscribe, the music you downloaded will no longer play.
The main way you'll interact with Apple Music most of the time is through the Apple Music
app which is available on iOS, Android, Mac, iPadOS, TVOS, ChromeOS, and WatchOS.
For Windows, you can use the iTunes app to listen to Apple Music or this into it,
through the web at music.apple.com.
So now, let's take a look at how to use the Apple Music app. There are 5 key sections: Listen Now,
Browse, Radio, Library, and Search. Listen Now shows you a lot of auto-generated playlists
and things to listen to that are based on your music preferences and listening history. When
you want to find something to listen to, this will likely be one of the first places you should go to
in the app. Browse shows you recommendations for what to listen to based on what’s hot
in music today. You can see what songs are topping the charts on Apple Music
in your country or a different country, or even in major cities. You can also browse
music by mood, see new album releases that are popular, and even see upcoming albums.
One cool thing about upcoming albums in Apple Music is that you can add them to
your library. To do this, click the add button to add it to your library. Upcoming albums will
show the expected album release date and any singles currently available like on
Ed Sheeran’s upcoming album, for example. Also you’ll likely see
animated album artwork on some newer albums which is another cool Apple Music feature.
Now, another important feature of both the Listen Now and Browse tabs are Playlists. Typically the
Listen Now tab will have more auto-generated playlists with music tuned to your music tastes,
like Replay 2021, which shows my favorite tracks of the year all in one playlist,
New Music Mix, a mix of new music based on your music tastes, Favorites Mix, Get Up Mix,
which obviously has an upbeat tone, Browse will have more genre or artist-focused playlists.
And if you find a playlist you like, make sure you add it to your library. This is so
it'll be easier to find the next time you want to listen to it.
To do this, just hit the three dots next to the playlist and select add to library.
From the library, auto generated playlists will continually update with new songs and
if you have automatic downloads turned on, which we’ll cover in a second,
the new songs added to these playlists will automatically download as well.
Now that's just one part of Apple Music's playlist feature. You can, of course,
create your own playlist to share with friends, family, or just keep for yourself.
To create a playlist go into your Apple Music Library and find the playlists
section, then select Add New Playlist. From there you can give your playlist a name,
description, and if you want your playlist to show up in your profile,
and I’ll cover what that is in a second, and then finally you can add music to your playlist.
This will bring up a new window where you can search either all of Apple Music
or just your music library for specific music to add to your playlist.
Once you’ve found a piece of music you want to add, click the plus button next to the song to
add it to your new playlist. Once you’ve added some songs to your playlist you can go back and
start re-ordering them to the order you want and then click done to save your new playlist.
Now, if you want to share the music that you're currently listening to or playlists with friends
or family who also use Apple Music, you can do this by utilizing the profile feature.
Go to Listen Now and at the top right corner click on your profile icon and then select view profile
or Get started, depending on if you’ve setup a profile before or this is your first time setting
one up. Profiles allow you to share what you’ve been listening to, certain playlists, and allow
you to follow your friends to see what they’re listening to. You can set your profile to allow
anyone on Apple Music to follow you or set it to private to let only certain people follow you.
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Now, let's jump back into the app and look at the tabs again. And the next tab to talk about
is the radio tab. In Apple Music there are two types of radio stations. The first is
auto generated stations based off a particular song, genre or artist you choose. You can create
one of these by clicking the 3 dots next to a song or artist and select create station.
the Radio tab in Apple Music features the old school kind of radio delivered to you
over the internet with some modern features and is a great way to discover new music that isn’t
just generated from an algorithm. There are 3 main radio stations in Apple Music as of 2021:
Apple Music 1, Apple Music Hits, and Apple Music County. Each station then has their
own unique lineup of shows with different hosts playing different types of music from Zane Low to
even Elton John who hosts a weekly radio show on Apple Music, properly called Rocket Hour.
When you’re listening to music through an Apple Music radio station, you have the
ability to not only see information about the song your listening to but just as important,
the ability to like and dislike the song as well as add it to your library.
You can listen live to a radio show or listen to a previous episode,
which I do a lot so I can fast forward the songs I’m not interested in.
Alright, the next tab is the Library tab and that’s where you’ll find
all of your downloaded music, playlists, anything you’ve added to your library,
regardless if its from Apple Music or a previous iTunes library. There are two reasons why you
would add something to a library in Apple Music. The first being that you need to download music
in order to download music and Apple Music, you need to first add that music
to your library. Or two, you want to add that music to your library, knowing
that by doing that, you will influence Apple Music's algorithms to play more music like it.
The library is also a convenient place to just store the music you like for easy
access and you can sort the library to see the recent albums or songs you’ve added
as well by going into the songs, or albums section,
tapping sort at the top and then selecting recently added from the menu that appears.
You can also set up Apple Music on certain devices like an iPhone to automatically download new music
that you add to your library and you can enable this by going to the settings app on an iPhone,
selecting Music, and then scroll down to the downloads section and toggle on Automatic
downloads. Here you can also toggle on downloading Dolby Atmos and we’ll cover what that is in a bit
as well as see what music you’ve already downloaded and make any edits to that. If
your Apple device is running low on storage space, you can enable the optimize storage
option to automatically remove music from your iPhone that you’ve haven’t played in a while
and select the minimum amount of music you want downloaded to your iPhone.
The last tab is Search, which gets its own dedicated tab in Apple Music and
also lets you browse popular categories as
well, and this is going to be where you’ll spend a good amount of time in Apple Music. You can
search for songs, albums, artists, etc, and one nice thing is when you search for an Artist,
the search results will then show sections for that artist’s songs albums, playlists etc.
So that's in general how the Apple Music app is organized and what you can find in each section.
Now let's go through what actually happens when you decide to play some music and the
best ways to curate what to play next. When you play any piece of music on Apple Music,
this will bring up what’s called the Now Playing Screen. On most versions of the
Apple Music app you can make this full screen and then swipe down from the top
or tap the bar at the top of the Now Playing screen to get back to the rest of the app.
Now first, of course you have music controls to play/pause, skip forward and skip backward which
we’d expect here. The next set of controls that are important are helping you control what plays
after the current music you’re listening to. You can hit the Playing Next icon which is the little
list icon at the bottom right corner to bring up this view which on mobile will show you Autoplay,
Shuffle and Repeat, while larger screen Apple Music apps like the iPad will show the shuffle and
repeat icons closer to the other music controls. Shuffle is a mode that randomizes the order of
songs in an album or playlist. Repeat will either repeat an album or playlist you’ve selected
or if you tap the repeat symbol twice and see a little 1 symbol on it,
this will repeat the current track of music you’re listening to so it’ll start over again.
Autoplay is found in the Playing Next section. When you turn on AutoPlay,
Apple Music will use data from your likes, what’s in your library, plus the music that
you’re currently playing to figure out what to play next. Now, this is the perfect place to pause
and take a quick second to talk about how do you actually influence Apple Music’s algorithms and
suggestions so they get better for you over time. And there are two main ways to do this,
the first is loving or disliking music. And then the second is adding music to your library. You
can love or dislike a song by pressing the three dots either on the now playing screen
or elsewhere in the Apple Music where you see three dots next to music like in search results.
If you have a previous iTunes library that’s merged with Apple Music you can also continue
to rate music in your library as well with the star system, But I find loving music or
disliking it easier to do because you can do that no matter where you are in the Apple Music app.
Now there's another way to control what music plays next and that’s to manually add songs,
artists and albums to the Playing Next queue. You can do this by going to any song,
playlist or album in Apple Music, selecting the 3 dots next to it and then either select
Play Next or Play Last. When you select Play Next, it’ll play that music immediately after the music
you’re currently listening to. Selecting Play Last will add that music to the end of your Playing
Next queue and you can even go into your Now Playing queue as well as the autoplay queue
to see upcoming music and reorder what music you want to play by selecting and
dragging music around. To delete a track from either of these queues,
you simply swipe from right to left on the track to delete it from your queue.
From the Playing Next view, you can also see your playing history by scrolling the list up,
making it easy to identify the tracks you just listened to.
Now another major feature in the now playing section is song lyrics.
You can click the song lyrics button, which sits right next to the Now Playing icon and
doing this will bring up animated song lyrics that are timed to the music that you're listening to.
Now, another thing you may notice throughout Apple Music, but especially in the Now Playing
section are badges like, Apple Digital Master, Lossless, and Dolby Atmos.
Apple Digital Master badges typically show up on albums and signify that Apple has certified
that the song or album you’re listening to, has been mastered in a way that is going to sound
good with no clipping or other audio distortion from the encoding process. You'll find that a lot
of major artists and major releases from the past 15 years will carry this badge.
Now let’s talk about lossless, as of mid-2021, Apple now offers lossless audio
with a maxim resolution of 24-bit/48 kHz (which is basically CD quality)
as well as Hi-Res Lossless option for a maxim resolution of 24-bit/192 kHz which requires
a digital-to-analogue converter to listen to this format, otherwise known as a DAC.
Apple was previously compressing music to 256 kilobits per second AAC. But now with lossless,
you're getting a much higher quality stream at CD quality, or better. To enable lossless
playback for Apple Music you’ll need to go into your Apple Music settings,
which for Apple iPad and iPhones is located in the settings app, on the Mac this is found in
the toolbar at the top and on Android hit the 3 dots at the top right corner and select settings.
Once in Apple Music settings, you’ll want to look for audio quality and then select
lossless or high resolution lossless for wifi & cellular playback to make sure
that the music you’re listening to is in the lossless format.
So that’s lossless, now what is Dolby Atmos you may ask. Dolby Atmos is Apple
Music’s newest type of format that basically gives the music you listen to more space.
Vocals feel farther forward and sound engineers can do some cool tricks with this new format
like placing certain instruments behind you for example. To enable Dolby Atmos go into
your Apple Music settings and then turn Dolby Atmos either on or set to automatic. Automatic
will automatically switch to Dolby Atmos on for music that supports it, but just know this mode
only works with certain Apple products like the AirPods Max, AirPods Pro etc.
Now, the last thing to mention in the Now Playing section is the AirPlay or Cast button that you'll
see depending on the device you're using with Apple Music. On iOS devices, you can
tap it to airplay music to different speakers or speaker groups in your home that support
AirPlay. On Android you can use the cast button to cast to airplay devices or Google Cast enabled
speakers like the Nest Audio or Nest Mini, both of which we’ve done reviews of on the channel.
Now if you have smart speakers like those I just mentioned or Amazon Echos, or Apple’s own HomePod
Minis which we’ve done long term reviews on the channel that I’ll link down below, you
can actually use the Assistants on these devices to play music
from Apple Music at least here in the US.
Now if you live outside of the US, you’ll want to double check and make sure that Apple Music
is supported on the smart speaker you're planning on using it with. For HomePod Minis you don’t need
to do any setup if you have Apple Music but you will with Amazon Echo devices and Google Assistant
devices. For Google Assistant speakers, go into the Google Home app, select Music, and then link
your Apple Music account. If you’re just wanting the Google Assistant on a phone to play from Apple
Music, go into your Google Assistant settings, select Music, and link your Apple Music account.
For Amazon, open the Alexa app, and apologies for triggering your device, I can’t help that’s
what they named the app. Go to play, scroll all the way down to manage services and then you can
link Apple Music as your music service for your Amazon speakers and make it the default service.
When using Apple Music with smart speakers and Assistants you can actually ask the
Assistants to do things like play music from a specific artist, specific song,
album, playlist. And when you use Siri, you can actually ask Siri to
add whatever you're currently listening to to your library, which is pretty convenient. One
other device that you can use Apple Music with that I've mentioned before is the Apple Watch.
You can download music right to your Apple Watch
or stream music over wifi or a cellular connection, if you watch supports that,
and connect bluetooth earbuds or headphones directly to the watch and then you play music,
bypassing having to use an iPhone, perfect if you want to workout and leave your phone behind.
You can search for music on the Apple Music app
on the watch. But the easiest way I found to actually get music onto an Apple Watch
is by using the Apple Watch app on an iPhone. scroll down till you see music,
tap that and then you can select if you want recent music to automatically be added to your
watch and there you can manually add albums and playlists to your Apple Watch as well. And note,
your Apple Watch will only download new music when connected to power and your iPhone is nearby.
Now, the last thing to mention about Apple Music is uploading music to your library
on a Mac. You can do this by opening up the music app and then choose file,
add to library, or file, import the file or folder with your music and then click open.
You can also alternatively drag a file or folder from finder on a Mac to the Apple
Music window to import it as well. And if you have a windows computer,
you can use the same steps that I mentioned for Mac, just with using the iTunes application.
And that's my how-to guide for how to use Apple Music.
I hope you found this video helpful. If you have any questions at all still about Apple Music
or you have any tips that you've learned along the way using the service, make sure to leave a
comment below and don't forget to hit that thumbs up button if you found this video helpful and
useful, and subscribe to the channel to see more how-to videos and Apple videos like this one.
Also, we've got a free monthly newsletter and you can check that out by using the
link in the description below. For 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder, thanks for watching.