> The people who guided that transition (Netflix's) could offer their insights
I was there for the transition. IT wasn't all that much of a transition. Netflix was always a company that was digital and used data to make decisions. We just switch from delivering disks to bits and then had a whole lot more data to work with.
Apple would need a DNA change -- they treat their services as lead gen for hardware sales, as the article mentions.
There is no secret, other than they would need to treat their internet services as a first class citizen along with their hardware group, instead of as something to make their hardware worth more. But that would mean acknowledging that there are other hardware platforms out there.
One of the main reason Netflix is currently beating a lot of the other players is because they work on so many different kinds of hardware from many competing companies.
If Apple bought Netflix (as this article suggests), it would kill Netflix unless they let them keep making a 1st class Android app. And that is what Apple has to do if they want their internet services to be taken seriously -- they have to start acting like Apple hardware isn't the only hardware out there, and also that maybe people aren't only using Apple apps on their iPhones.
I don't think it's just the "internet services" that they need to take more seriously. Ever since I bought my iphone (about 1 week ago) I've had an itch to write a blog post about my first experiences using their Clock app... Their CLOCK app :)
Possibly. But even if the clock app was simply a single "start timer" button (or whatever function the GP was using) simply getting to the app can be Slow. Compare "take
Out phone, unlock phone, find clock app, open app, do whatever" with just saying "hey Siri set a timer for 5 mins" or "take out phone, press and hold home button, tell Siri to start a timer"
vibrate-only alarms don't work. The UI allows you to set no sound, and choose a vibrate pattern, but it doesn't trigger when it's supposed to. I learned that you have to create and load a "silent.mp3" file and select that sound for the alarm in order to get vibrate-only alarms to work.
As a (former?) insider, can you explain why on Netflix there is only one view for browsing movies? Many people like myself prefer a listview with no covers, so much more efficient. A very quick slide right to view the already loaded description would be icing on the cake.
I'm not the insider, but I'm pretty sure the reason Netflix's browsing UX is so poor is that if it were any more streamlined, it would be obvious how few titles they really have.
I suspect it'll get better as they sign more deals and/or produce more of their own content.
Especially outside the US, which is most the world, the library is actually very, very poor. At least 10 times smaller than in the US (while the price is obviously doubled).
This may or may not be obvious to people within the US.
It is to give you the appearance of large selection though they don't. UI gimmicks to steer you away from the low selection problem. Frustrating for a small selection their customer base - mostly tech people who can see through this bull-shit. Annoying, but not enough to quit the service. Netflix knows this. Any smart person who realizes this will feel like an idiot for being taken for a ride like this. Gives up and submits to this treatment as Netflix is rather top of the market in selection for non-linear TV.
I realize what they're doing with the UI, but I also realize that they're not doing it just to be dicks. Netflix has to negotiate content deals with some of the greediest and most short-sighted people in the business world. I wish them the best of luck.
> that would mean acknowledging that there are other hardware platforms out there.
I guess this also explains why Apple doesn't make a web-based version of iTunes (similar to Spotify's web player or Google Play Music) or even the Mac App Store?
What sense would a "web based version" of the Map App Store or the iTunes have?
Good or bad as they are, their whole point is their system integration -- installing apps, managing your music library etc. Not merely browsing and downloading to "Downloads" folder.
What enrages me to no end is that iTunes doesn't work well with my iPod Touch, a device designed to play music.
1. No, I don't want my iPod to use Apple Music by default. I'm carrying a device with 20GB of music on it, I don't need you to search for a wifi signal on this train and then try to connect with my non-existent Apple Music account. And there's no way to shift this default setting to use the iPod internally-stored music.
2. Two days ago, I took a deep breath and tried to sync iTunes with my iPod for the first time in 6 months. All I wanted to do was move my one newly-purchased album that iTunes had (the new Radiohead, if you want to know) onto my iPod. I still don't know what happened but it ended up deleting all my music, which then required a full sync to move those 20GB back onto my iPod (which, as a reminder, is a device designed to play music.)
Spotify is the best for discovering new music from other users. Apple is great because of Beats 1 and their curated playlists. But the core features are basically identical.
> Spotify is the best for discovering new music from other users
I guess you've never experienced rdio? There we had a real thriving community of music lovers. Albums were discussed in comments under the item in questions, comments were rated, replies could be added. Popular and recent comments of your friends were featured on your frontpage. The heavy rotation section revealed a single users' (or a group for that matter) current taste at a glance, I could start any user's personal radio station.
Compared to that Spotify is a social tragedy - the activity tab has to be one of the most disappointing areas of the service. I can shout, but nobody can get back to me or discuss anything there.
Unfortunately you can't register from anywhere anymore. They closed shop (or have been bought by Pandora, which then closed the service) late last year.
Apple's UI for the Music app is practically unusable compared to Spotify's. They make it so bloody hard to find anything. One screen contains 4 different actions, with a tiny half-height panel being swipeable to get at critical functionality that should be on a dedicated screen. It's not a professional interface.
>> Apple is great because of Beats 1
... if I wanted radio I would subscribe to Sirius. I'm not going to pay $10+/month for a single radio station.
Spotify is great for many more foreign and obscure genres and artists. It's nowhere near complete, but it gets closest to having everything I look for.
> - I can play music on any device logged into the account from any other device logged into the account
This is the only reason for me sticking with Spotify instead of Apple Music. It lets me have the Spotify app running on my htpc and I can easily control it from any device running Spotify. No need for AirPlay, Bluetooth etc.
Issue 1: Settings App -> Music -> Show Apple Music (toggle this off, obviously)
Issue 2: iTunes being so terrible is probably the best argument against resolving Issue 1.
I believe the default is not to automatically use Apple Music, though, and rather to prompt the user to try it. I know that I declined, and haven't seen it since.
Though the iOS Music app has been getting worse every year regardless. I keep meaning to write a replacement that just operates mostly the way it did until iOS 6 or 7.
> Issue 1: Settings App -> Music -> Show Apple Music (toggle this off, obviously)
I was secretly hoping that somebody would post the solution to the problem, so I just excitedly opened up the Music section on my Ipod touch...only to find that there is no "Show Apple Music" slider. I just googled it again and found a page with your same solution[0] which says it should work on the ipod and includes a screenshot, but my ipod doesn't have that section. When I get home, I'll try disabling Apple Music on iTunes to see if that works.
So I have "Show Apple Music" set to off in Settings, yet still when I get out in the boonies with a really weak cell signal, opening Music will result in a black Apple Music splash page that never fully loads, blocking me from accessing all the music I've synced to my iPhone. I end up having to turn on Airplane Mode to access the songs on my device. It's so stupid.
So the trick is to first enable Restrictions, then toggle off Apple Music Connect, then do what bydo says in his comment above (Settings App -> Music -> Show Apple Music (off)).
Yup. I ditched the built in music player after they insisted on making it worse and worse every release. I installed Google music right when it came out and haven't looked back. Pretty much the features Spotify has, but I was able to upload all my songs that gmusic didn't have.
I'm seriously, seriously considering this. Just gotta figure out how to make it happen. But my guess is that since my ipod touch is fairly new (1 generation old now) it won't work with old iTuneses.
Honestly, my biggest gripes with Apple Music come from Apple not being a data-science-type company.
When I go to the "For You" section of the music app, more often than not I'm greeted with albums I already have in my library, playlists titled "Intro to <artist I already listen to>", or random curated playlists that I've recently browsed through. Basically, it gives me nothing valuable on a regular basis. I find it very hard to discover new music with Apple Music. With Spotify, there was my "Discover Weekly" playlist which was perfect - 30 new songs that I should like given my listening history. And Spotify was fairly good at recommending new playlists to me as well.
Perhaps with Apple Music I'm taking the wrong approach. It might be more effective to use Radio for discovery, but for being based on Beats the curated playlists seem really lacking.
I keep bumping into this problem: a company that has a large media library (video, music, books) offers a client that lacks the basic search, filtering, and sorting functions that any half-decent programmer would consider Step One of a client app. I don't want clever discovery and recommendation algorithms (which never work, by the way); I want faceted search, filtering, and sorting. Amazon's storefront is just about the only AAA online service that gets this more or less right. I just don't understand what is going on at Apple and Netflix.
I don't want clever discovery and recommendation algorithms (which never work, by the way)
I take it you haven't tried discover weekly, then?
To be fair, it needs a fair bit of listening history to start making recommendations. But it is ridiculously good. Since what you will like isn't a deterministic function of your listening history, it has to take some chances, you have to accept that it won't always hit. When it does, though, oh boy.
I don't use Spotify. I'll take your word for it, though.
I grew up with radio, and I used to like to listen to the college stations where there was no format and the selections came from the personal taste of another person. On Apple Music, the curated playlists are OK in that respect. Also, since I live in Japan, the "Top 100" lists change really quickly and can include some interesting and surprising discoveries.
My gripe isn't so much with the efficacy of recommendation engines, anyway. I'm complaining about the lack of useful basic search/sort/filtering. I would say about 50% of the searches that I run on Apple Music end with a blank artist placeholder page, or re-route me into the iTunes Store, or pull up totally irrelevant results, or otherwise end in confusion because there app, the store, the library, and the streaming service are all whipped up into a tangle that no one can seriously be expected to navigate.
The other radio stations e.g. Soundsystem, Pop, whatever are another option. But fully agree that the For You section is pointless and worst of all unimaginative. I rarely want to hear a playlist of 30 Drake songs in a row.
Spotify absolutely kills Apple Music when it comes to their core and community generated playlists. But I absolutely love Beats 1 so keep using it because of that.
I really wish the Music app would just act like my old iPod. I have some set of music available. It's categorized in different ways I can set. It plays music. Done.
Streaming? Just treat it as a playlist. Remember a song off a stream? Make that be like an adhoc playlist. Just let me mash a button and play music. Let me hit a button, and it remembers the current song. Want to let me pick a stream? Let me navigate just a few steps down a menu and pick something. Hit play. Music. Done.
I feel like it's designed to steer you away from the concept of having a music collection and toward a more fluid streaming approach. This in turn could have revenue motives-- payola, ad revenue, etc.
In any case count me out. I'm on the brink of dumping Apple for all music. I hate things on principle that feel like they're designed to "guide me" toward a desired "consumer behavior."
I also hate what this does to music. Music isn't meaningful in this model. It's a formless uniform commodity that you consume on demand. Maybe that works for disposable pop that all sounds the same but not for music you care about.
I wish that were the only problem... Unfortunately, even as someone ready to embrace "Music as a service", it's quite frustrating. I only use it every few days, and I don't know how many times I've tried to find something in "Apple Music", only to get lost somewhere in the pay-to-own-store (which I've never used). It seems Apple Music just doesn't show up if they don't have it, or maybe when iTunes fails to connect to the authorization server (which would bring us to problem 2: hey Apple! How about something like 10 minutes grace period? I'm online 98% of the time, but iTunes seems to immediately stop if I'm not).
> I feel like it's designed to steer you away from the concept of having a music collection and toward a more fluid streaming approach.
This is definitely why. It's also why Apple barely pays attention to the iPod line and hasn't shown any interest in making a large storage device like the iPod classic (which I foolishly sold!).
I use it every day. It pretty much does those things. The little Heart button is your "remember the current song".
The really confusing/annoying thing for me is there's no history AFAIK. So no looking up the previous song if you didn't get to hit the heart button because you were driving. Even finding a previous streaming/radio playlist is impossible sometimes. Click away from it, and now how do you get back? On the iPad: You don't AFAICT. Best you can do is bring up the Up Next list if you don't remember the search/navigation that found the playlist in the first place.
"Heart" actually doesn't function as "remember" as there's no way to see songs in Apple Music (not in your library) that you've previously "loved"[1]. It's supposedly used to help refine recommendations[2].
I could be wrong, but I'm not sure how else they'd be showing up in my library under "Recently Added" then. I didn't specifically create any new playlists or anything and it's just the songs I "hearted".
I assumed it was just a "genius" thing at first as well, but there they are. Maybe it's new.
There's a history screen. Tap on the player (if it's minimized to the bottom) To the right of the Fast Forward icon, there's a list icon, that opens the history.
My hopes are on an Apple Music API. It's just been released for iOS(https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/a...) and I'd say it's just a matter of time. With all the frustration out there, music players should become the next hot segment (kinda like RSS readers, then twitter clients, then email clients before).
Spotify has had a public API for years, which never really took off, other than some speakers and lyrics applications. I doubt this is going to do much better.
My gripe with the music app is the super small buttons. I've got a plus size phone, yet this app makes me feel like Shrek trying to fold delicate origami when I want to pause a song.
I really didn't find it that bad. People who like Spotify are just used to it.
I recently went through all the major ones (that is one way to get a few months free streaming) on my Android and there really isn't much of a difference except for the curated lists.
> and there really isn't much of a difference except for the curated lists.
I recently switched to Play Music, because they seem to be much friendlier to my battery life than Spotify. I also prefer their algorithmic discovery features to Spotify's primarily human-curated approach (which inherently favours what's mainstream over what I like).
I ended up with Play Music for pretty much the same reason. The only feature I miss these days is the slider from last.fm - going from known to obscure. I'd love to have that in Google Play, as well as a switch in the radio that disables music I already have in the library. Basically "play things based on my playlist, but not anything I heard before, and remove any radio-pop-crap"
I made the same switch and this is coming from someone who uses an iPhone and Mac. Agreed on Spotify -- the helper app is always freaking out and using 100% CPU.
I wish there was an official Play app on the desktop, but the third party ones work pretty well (I really only need the keyboard shortcuts). The Play iOS app is fantastic and quick.
The Spotify "Discover Weekly" seems to do pretty well at finding stuff I like. Although it does seem to be a bit biased toward some of my tastes more than others.
Yeah, I've noticed that too. Probably it's a keys under street light phenomenon, that it prefers to search where it can find the keys (should they be there) than where they probably are but they wouldn't be able to find them anyway.
This might explain why they seem overly weighted towards Swedish music in my DW.
Discover Weekly worked great for me too, but I found it annoying to have to wait for another one-week cycle (and inevitably losing some great song that I forgot to save...).
Because it was an acquihire that had to integrate quickly into iTunes.
I'd imagine that integration of Beats into iTunes didn't start in earnest before the Beats acquisition was final, which was sometime Q4 2014? That gave essentially 6 months for the integration?
When you think about what's involved in that task, it's probably even more amazing that it even works as well as it does.
From my understanding the rights from Beats Music did not carry over with the acquisition, and Apple Music doesn't use Beats Music in any form. The acquisition was for the headphones, which have insane margins and are a "status symbol" that doesn't relate to quality at all...much like Apple itself.
That's not what I said, I said the licensing didn't carry over. Of course Beats Music was included in the purchase, but the deals Beats had with the music industry (licensing agreements) were nullified during the acquisition, from my understanding. So building on top of the Beats infrastructure wouldn't make -that- much sense. I'm sure some code was recycled, but the apps are very very different from one another. You could argue that Beats was more ironed out.
Not sure why I was downvoted, you can search online and see analysts questioning the streaming service deal because of the licensing being unlikely to carry over post-purchase. You can also see them chiming in on massive margins that Beats makes from their headphones and how it helps Apple seal more of the supply chain. The headphones were clearly the play, not Beats Music.
That doesn't even matter. I have both an iPhone and Mac and the Music experience is awful. Match is a danger to your music library and Apple Music is slow, unreliable, buggy, and the UX is a confusing mess.
The fact that both the Spotify and Google Play iOS apps perform better and are easier to understand from a UX perspective is embarrassing for Apple.
Apple should have bought Spotify instead of Beats. They have the money, they still could.
Spotify is such a far superior service, it works exactly as you'd expect it to, it has a free tier and a paid tier, it's basically as good as it gets for a music streaming service.
I subscribe to all the music services. I subscribed to Google Play because of the Songza concierge asset.
One byproduct? It seems that Google Play's CDN and DRM handling, not to mention caching, is way superior to Spotify. Whether I am on wifi, LTE, or getting in my car and therefore in between the two, hitting play on Google Play will always result in a song playing within two seconds.
On Spotify, it's more like 10 seconds. And it may not play at all. It may be stuck reauthing my account. It may be stuck in a stateless DRM hypoxia where every track is greyed out, although I am authenticated. It's impossible to predict.
I think Spotify built a really cool 2007-era P2P infrastructure. Then turned it off. And never tried to think beyond the state of the art since then.
I agree with how well Play music works. I did Spotify for awhile and tracks would disappear and I never really did like the UI. Then Play music came out and I switched over and never looked back. I did the Apple Music beta and it was fine, but I'm still on the early adopter Play deal of 7.99/month and now it includes ad free youtube. Hard to leave at this point.
I have the opposite problem with Google Play. I use it as a backup system for all my MP3s and it feels like when I hit play sometimes a Google employee is having to go to the shed out back, riffle through some DVDs, find the one that has my song backed up, bring it back, load it in the computer, copy it off, upload it somewhere, and _then_ I get to listen to it. Half the time the track will just sit there and spin without ever playing, and Google will just give up and progress to another track on the album. It's awful.
It's amazing how much better Spotify is at finding related music I also like. Pandora, Google Play, that thing in iTunes -- all annoying. The other ones find bands that sound like bands I like but are annoying. Spotify actually finds me stuff I'm glad to have discovered. The other ones just find annoying doppelgangers of my favorite music.
(To be fair, Pandora is better than the others, but dependent on genre. It does really well with classical music. With lots of electronica/electronica related music -- very annoying.)
I found Rdio to be the best of all possible options. It still is disappointing to me that 1) Apple didn't buy Rdio and 2) Pandora still has done nothing with the IP they got out of the deal.
Rdio had some really creative curation features. The "What's Hot" feature, which was a current hits list of what your friends like and are listening to was really amazing.
Their auto-play radio feature (it would start playing similar music based on what you just finished listening to) was great.
And lastly their "adventurous" slider, which allowed the radio station song search to land somewhere in the spectrum of just songs in your collection to new stuff you didn't have but was in some way related to the current radio station being played....man.....this feature alone was worth the whole subscription in my opinion.
Interesting. I switched from Spotify to Apple Music. The "For You" section with curated playlists were way better than the Spotify playlists IMO. I only wish that I could choose an activity (workout, etc.) and/or mood and a genre and I'd be all set.
There could be some genre specificity at play here. I like certain stuff that's influenced by Deep House, but find a lot of things that are "cool" in House music to be highly annoying. I'm a fan of British Isles traditional music, but find I already know most of the good stuff. I like certain contemporary French songwriters, but find most of them kinda samey.
The Spotify equivalent of "For You" is where I'm having the most luck. Maybe I'll give Apple another go.
Are you talking of DW or the more generic similar artists/discover tab then? Because the former is far better than the latter.
Funnily enough, it has recommended a lot of British Isles trad/folk to me, (and also Québécois, for some reason) most of which is OK but some of which is really interesting. It's found several long medieval ballads, which I would have thought was far too niche to recommend.
DW is most fruitful. If you are into British Isles trad/folk, there's a lot of wonderful Québécois stuff. Those guys often have better Irish trad chops than local Irish trad prodigies. Then on top of that, add in all the odd Acadian/french influence. I got to play with some of those guys in Christmas Revels.
For me, I find Spotify better at finding & playing known music, but Pandora is better at finding similar music on a discovery basis. Maybe I just don't get the Spotify clients options for discovering music - everytime I go to discover new music there, other than broad genres or single-specific artists - it seems I hit limited options or dead ends.
Discover weekly is ok, but I can only assume is processed vs your entire library at best. What I would love from Spotify is playlist button that said play this list and related music.
I think that Google Play is a little bit better than Spotify at finding related music I also like. Spotify's related bands list was a little better than Google's, but Google's radio-style playlists that you can create off of a song, a playlist, or just "I'm feeling lucky" are awesome almost every time. I used Spotify for longer but I feel like I'm getting a lot more value out of Google Play.
Obviously there's a lot of personal preference here. Add in that Google has a TON of info on me, way more than Spotify could ever have, and it's almost not a fair comparison. I should mention that I left Spotify because they have a 10,000-songs limit on how many songs you can save, even with a paid account, and that was absolutely absurd to me- IIRC, Google lets you actually upload more tracks than Spotify would let you save.
Checked all of them and Google Music was just better on all front. My biggest grip with Spotify is that I couldn't upload all my own music/playlists and have them there along with the new music I'll listen to through their service.
My guess is they looked into it and thought this would be cheaper. Especially because in the long run apple might win this fight with exclusive artist deals (Taylor Swift, etc) which may prove more important than a great interface.
The main issue with Spotify for me – bearing in mind it's the music subscription service I use – is that the applications have continued to become shittier and shittier with each release, to the point where I'm actively considering escaping simply so I never have to use them again.
If they were going to buy just a streaming service they should have bought Rdio. But–and this was kind of the focus of the article–Apple has an internal bias towards hardware. They saw a music-y hardware play with a huge markup and a ton of brand capital and went for it.
First off, Apple bought Beats for their headphones, not their failing music service; but secondly if Apple had bought Spotify they'd be under the anti-trust microscope.
Debatable. They had to get into the streaming business sooner or later, Beats Music was comparatively cheap and if not more popular, superior in at least some technical/UI regards.
Who said they wanted good headphones? Beats had insane margins. Their headphones cost $7-10 to produce and sell for $100. Apple is about money and cashflow more so than quality.
The iphone WAS so good. Now when I buy an iphone I have to go through 10 dialog boxes of nagging for Apple Pay, Apple Music, iCloud, etc, etc. And regularly, whether after a system update or a randomly, the nagging starts all over again. This is really annoying. At one point in the iphone music player, I would regularly be redirected to the apple music tab while trying to get to my playlists.
It's a race to the bottom between Apple and Microsoft. I omit Google as I do not really have any experience with their OS. Are they doing less nagging for their services?
> . I omit Google as I do not really have any experience with their OS. Are they doing less nagging for their services?
If you buy a (Nexus) Android device, the device comes preloaded with all the Google services and apps, but you are only nagged about two things:
1. log in with a Google Account (for Play Store, Gmail, Calendar and all the others), and 2. Opting in to Google Location services.
That's about it. What get's annoying though is if you for whatever reason ever need to factory reset your phone, you will have to go through various splash-screens and introduction pages in all the apps (Maps, Youtube, Photos, etc) again.
I'd say the nagging factor on Android (at least for the paid apps I use) are as close to zero you can get.
Compared to for instance Windows, it feels much better.
Aside from the usual setup stuff (do you want to setup backups?) or when opening applications that obviously require an account to function (Play Store, for example), I haven't had any nagging on Android. Never had an update delete all my data, either.
That said, some of their stuff does require an account even when you think it isn't warranted, such as reading arbitrary PDFs through their Play Books app (though the Drive PDF reader works fine regardless).
I signed up for Apple Music but returned to Spotify because it's just simpler and more pleasant to use the Mac app instead of iTunes, and the iOS app works better for me with its "recently played" list that allows me to better return to recent discoveries.
Apple Music fails becaus it's not magical like the iPod was versus the competition. It's a complicated player.
I believe Apple Music should be more like Google for music. A big search button and a recently played music easily accessible, also publicly playable widgets so you could share music on the web instead of resorting to YouTube.
I like Apple music on android. It works quite well, even if there are some kinks to work out. The thing that stops me from using it full time instead of Spotify is that the Windows client is iTunes. And I'm not going to install iTunes. There's a part of my brain which is permanently scarred due to iTunes.
iTunes has become so horrible over the years that on my list of products I want to launch in my lifetime is a music player / manager. Every one I've ever seen is horrendous. None of them allow me to manage music in anything approaching a sane fashion. None of them allow me to add music from multiple sources, forcing me to deal with multiple entries in a dumb library.
My music library is huge, but I have no desire to listen to every single song on it. My shuffle pool is a hand-curated selection of some 500 tracks out of perhaps 10,000. I can recreate the pool when I have to but it's a phenomenal pain in the ass.
I used to do okay with the checked song feature in iTunes. But the checks are not respected by the software and there's no easy way to back them up and restore. After enough times syncing my phone to find songs that I'd unchecked magically got checked again, I switched to manual management.
I hate keeping state on my laptop but I've had to learn to put up with keeping it on my phone because Apple is just horrible at it. More than once I've lost all that state and had to recreate it. It's a skill I don't want to have to be good at.
Fucking Apple. If they can't figure this shit out, then one day I'm going to eat their lunch. It would not be hard at all to make a music app that's 10x better than their tripe.
Lately I've been strongly considering making my own personal streaming system.
I've spent years building a large and organized collection. I'm reluctant to switch to a streaming service because I'll lose the years of ratings, playlists, playcounts etc that I rely on, but at the same time both desktop and mobile software get worse all the time.
Yeah, but this is Apple we're talking about. They used to be excellent at boiling a feature set down to the essential needed for most. It's the whole reason why they got hugely successful in the first place, remember the original iPod?
The problem I had with Android was that the Bluetooth support for the Nexus device was shit. That turned out to be a much worse problem than the library management issues I'm having with Apple. If I can't even have a satisfactory experience streaming music to my car, that's just a total non-starter. It would be like a phone that could do everything but make calls, but I actually use my device way more for music than for phone calls.
Serious question - why not just open it up to third party developers? Just provide a sanctioned API to play (& save offline) tracks, and then let independent apps compete to come up with the best interface, tailored to individual tastes, as long as the end user has an Apple Music subscription.
Walled gardens and being control freaks. That's been the status quo for years. It's been what devs complained about for ages too. ("I made that app, then Apple released something similar but worse, and now they reject my app from the store.")
I don't know why though... maybe it's just about keeping customers in the ecosystem? Most common reason I hear for getting an Apple product lately is "I have other things from Apple and they work together". Slightly ignoring the fact you're just burying yourself deeper in Apple dependencies rather than getting something that works with iOS/OSX and other systems.
I recently tested them all (because I moved abroad and couldn't move on the local app store without losing all my songs I had on iTunes match) and the only one that worked well for me is Google Music. I can upload all my songs there, it kept my playlists, my library is separated from their own catalog. It's not perfect, I wish iTunes match and Google music could meet in the middle. But I'm scared for the future of iTunes Match and I can't mass download my music from it so...
I moved away from Apple because of their awful software.. their Podcast app was probably the worst one. Granted, I was stuck on iOS 7 because I had an iPhone 4, so maybe they stopped supporting it, but it was basically unusable.
I think the press echo chamber trope about how "Apple is a hardware company" is lazy thinking.
WWDC last year provided a simple explaination explaining the whole Music shitshow -- remember the incoherent presentation?
Cook probably delegated the Music product to Dr Dre and Iovine, and they grafted their music insights and radio on top of Music.app, which was a mess to begin with. ...Or some similar organizational mess where lots of big egos weighed in hit and run style.
Remember, the PR push from Apple last year was all about how brilliant Ive, Dr Dre and Iovine were. There was a wired cover gushing about how they were "saving" music.
The apps may not be that great (though I don't really have that many problems, except for occasional iTunes slowness on the Mac), what they nailed is making the whole thing more engaging.
I have been a Spotify and Google Play Music subscriber before and I always found these very mechanical - you either know what to play, try to find some playlists or get some recommendation from an algorithm.
Beats 1 is very nice. The programs are more fun to listen to than some arbitrary playlists or music discovery. There is some talk and the music selection is much more interesting. Advantages over normal radio are that niches are better represented (I really liked Josh Homme's 'The Alligator Hour') and you can easily add interesting stuff to your library.
Their hardware isn't even that great. iPhone screens are still too small, iPhones still need proprietary poorly-designed cables, they have a track record of buttons easily wearing out or breaking, and their laptops are unreasonably thin to the point of being detrimental to usability (only two usb ports, need a special adapter to connect hdmi/dvi/vga).
You want a bigger iPhone than the iPhone 6S+ ? That's strange.
And the MacBook Pro comes up with DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. DVI/VGA are very much legacy connections. All their other MacBoosk come with DisplayPort. And given how well they are selling I would argue that nobody is really clamouring for more than 2 USB ports or additional connectors.
It doesn't seem especially strang. I regularly see people with phones bigger than the iPhone 6. I assume they chose them because they wanted them that size.
Not a fan of apple music, mainly because I find my chord with Spotify earlier. But pinning the unpopularity (or rather low popularity) of the app to Apple "not" being an internet company or being a hardware-first company is probably near sighted.
Which app has a universal "reliability and likable UX design"? To each its own! I feel a lot of "new" users might be (and am pretty sure are) finding their good vibes with apple too.
The smaller userbase of Apple services compared to Google Maps/Spotify creates not only a data disadvantage but an incentive disadvantage. Apple needs to make Maps or Music or iMessage only good enough to keep you on the iPhone. Google has dozens of businesses dependent on great maps, from advertising to Maps API to self-driving cars, and thus will always invest more engineering and more labor into the service.
Please elaborate on those number if you are going to make statements like that. Citation? Apples music has 11 million paid subscribers. I don't think thats a data disadvantage. Considering the service is less than a year old even less so.
Yes, what I'm saying is that the incentive disadvantage is much bigger than the data disadvantage. Apple Maps is worse than Google Maps because Apple cannot justify the kinds of investments in product that Google can.
I tried switching over from Spotify to Apple Music when someone in my family bought a family plan and it became free for me, but after a few months I switched back to paid Spotify. For me, free Apple Music < Paying for Spotify. I just felt like I couldn't get around Apple Music intuitively and it became frustrating.
Actually, Photos is pretty great for a free program that doesn't sell your data. I don't use iCloud for photos, but I do use Photos occasionally for raw editing. By now it's good enough to replace my slightly old Lightroom license.
Of course, when I am done editing, the photos live on my filesystem + encrypted backups :).
I was there for the transition. IT wasn't all that much of a transition. Netflix was always a company that was digital and used data to make decisions. We just switch from delivering disks to bits and then had a whole lot more data to work with.
Apple would need a DNA change -- they treat their services as lead gen for hardware sales, as the article mentions.
There is no secret, other than they would need to treat their internet services as a first class citizen along with their hardware group, instead of as something to make their hardware worth more. But that would mean acknowledging that there are other hardware platforms out there.
One of the main reason Netflix is currently beating a lot of the other players is because they work on so many different kinds of hardware from many competing companies.
If Apple bought Netflix (as this article suggests), it would kill Netflix unless they let them keep making a 1st class Android app. And that is what Apple has to do if they want their internet services to be taken seriously -- they have to start acting like Apple hardware isn't the only hardware out there, and also that maybe people aren't only using Apple apps on their iPhones.