{"id":34481,"date":"2021-12-17T11:28:47","date_gmt":"2021-12-17T16:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=34481"},"modified":"2023-08-22T11:04:12","modified_gmt":"2023-08-22T15:04:12","slug":"apple-music-feedback-made-it-to-cook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/17\/apple-music-feedback-made-it-to-cook\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple Music Feedback Made It to Cook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dave B<\/a> (previously: 1<\/a>, 2<\/a>, 3<\/a>):<\/p>\n

In the 6+ years since Apple Music was released in June of 2015, it has been a controversial app, to put it mildly. In those 6 years, I’ve written extensively on Apple Music’s flaws — both big and small. Some of these flaws have been resolved, many haven’t, and some new ones have been introduced. It’s been a while since my 2017 list<\/a> of Apple Music’s shortcomings, so it’s time for a 2021 update.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Apple Music is trying to appeal to both crowds and in my opinion, it doesn’t get either one right. It’s stuck in the middle, doing a sort of half-hearted job at both. The result is that it provides a mediocre product to both Group A and Group B.<\/p>

Most Group B<\/strong> people will tell you that Apple Music’s recommendations are simply not as good as Spotify’s. Whatever suggestion algorithms Apple uses just aren’t nearly as accurate as they ought to be. They’ve improved over time, but they still have a long way to go. And it’s worth noting that tapping the ‘Love’ hearts or the ‘Suggest Less Like This’ button is supposed to improve the suggestion algorithms, but it doesn’t seem to work very well in practice. The curation often feels more like advertising, where the feature is less catered around what the end user wants, and more around what the content providers (i.e. Apple and\/or the record labels) wish to foist upon them. That’s a problem, as it makes the app feel like a collection of billboards<\/a>, rather than a user-focused experience.<\/p>

And for Group A<\/strong> people (of which I am one), the tools to be able to organize, sort, sift through, maintain, and play back a music library — are just sorely lacking and lead to a terrible experience.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Playlist management needs to be improved, with better folder functionality, more views, and a better use of space. Even a 5.4\" and 6.1” iPhone screen only displays 5 line items at a time<\/a>. By comparison, my old 2.5” iPod Classic displayed 9 line items. With only 5 lines, that means you have to scroll so much to get anywhere. And you still can’t place Apple Music playlists in folders. It also seems odd to me that the “New Playlist…” function is a line item rather than a button.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Dave B<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I sent a lengthy email to Tim Cook’s public email address all about Apple Music. I’ve been writing for years, thorough articles and analyses all about how I think the Apple Music app just isn’t very good and doesn’t meet the standards I’d expect from Apple. I’ve posted popular Medium articles, Reddit threads, countless Tweets directed at people in the Apple community (external and internal), and I’ve sent dozens of pieces of feedback to Apple via the iOS Feedback app.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I got an email and voicemail from someone in Tim Cook’s office who told me she wants to chat on the phone because Tim actually saw my email, personally read it, and forwarded it to people in engineering and on the product design team for Apple Music. She said she’d like to set up a call with me, so of course I jumped at the chance. We chatted on the phone a few days later, and she told me that Apple took my email seriously and may potentially implement some of my suggestions, although she obviously couldn’t promise anything or tell me anything about future plans, as that’s all confidential, and Apple is a super secret company, as we all know.<\/p>\n

She did specifically point out that it was very rare to have Tim Cook send his teams product suggestions he received via email - and she had never personally seen that happen before - so she was almost congratulatory to me in the fact that my email seemed to have impact.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

I can just say that between this and Apple’s recent Primephonic acquisition, I’m more excited for the future of Apple Music than I have been in a long time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

It’s nearly 2022 and Apple Music still can’t reliably add albums to your library without duplicating things all over the place, all to prop up a legacy iTunes library compatibility system I haven’t used in six years 😪<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Meanwhile, I use the legacy stuff and feel like the app is geared towards upselling me to Apple Music rather than meeting my needs. As I was writing this post, I got another<\/em> notification on the home screen icon telling me that I can get a free Apple Music trial.<\/p>\n

I wish I could use the old iPod app instead. I liked the simple lists of artist, album, and song names. The Music app now confuses that by mixing in grid views of album covers. Other apps like Cesium offer lists, but they are harder to read because (like in Music) each row has two lines of text (“Artist\/n songs” or “Song Name\/Artist”). Text is small because both lines have to fit within the height of the thumbnail. I end up seeing fewer list items at a time, and they’re harder to scan.<\/p>\n\n

Craig Mod<\/a>:<\/p>\n

it’s an interesting “experiential skeuomorphic” decision by apple to make Music.app so slow that it feels like getting up, lifting a tonearm, putting an old record back, and pulling out a new one each time you try to navigate to a new screen in the thing<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n