Web-Only Apple Music Features
Apple Music today announced the release of its 100 Best Albums of all time, a celebratory list of the greatest records ever made, crafted by Apple Music’s team of experts alongside a select group of artists, including Maren Morris, Pharrell Williams, J Balvin, Charli XCX, Mark Hoppus, Honey Dijon, and Nia Archives, as well as songwriters, producers, and industry professionals. The list is an editorial statement, fully independent of any streaming numbers on Apple Music — a love letter to the records that have shaped the world music lovers live and listen in.
Yet there is no exciting presentation of this list in Apple Music. There is a live radio broadcast — which cannot be found by searching, say, “100 best” or “top 100” — and the albums are shown in the featured boxes on the Browse tab, but there little else that I can find. To explore the list, you need to visit 100best.music.apple.com in a web browser, where each record gets a lovely write-up and explanation of why it is on the list. The same explanation appears in album descriptions. But, like the Replay feature, why is this not all within the app and on the web?
Previously:
Update (2024-05-30): Nick Heer:
It is beyond my understanding why anyone seems to be under the impression this list is anything more than a business reminding you it operates a music streaming platform to which you can subscribe for eleven dollars per month.
Speaking of the app — some time after I complained there was no way in Apple Music to view the list, Apple added a full section, which I found via foursliced on Threads. It is actually not bad. There are stories about each album, all the reveal episodes from the radio show, and interviews.
You will note something missing, however: a way to play a given album. That is, one cannot visit this page in Apple Music, see an album on the list they are interested in, and simply tap to hear it. There are play buttons on the website and, if you are signed in with your Apple Music account, you can add them to your library. But I cannot find a way to do any of this from within the app.
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This web app is relatively smooth on my 2020 Intel i3 MacBook Air in Safari. Since I had that Mac I never encountered a rich native experience that‘s as fluid coming from Apple. Many much simpler pieces of interface have way worse hitches.
Maybe they do this because they struggle with App Store approval.
Ba Dum Tss
Or probably, even worse, they are unable to update Music without updating the whole OS.
For a real fun time, try scrolling the page using the arrow keys on your keyboard.
This list reeks of payola. It's hard to understand why they would even do this, other than I guess the fact that it generates conversations about what should and shouldn't be on the list