There’s no doubt, Apple is trolling me. On September 3, I wrote about the new personalized mixes in Apple Music. I pointed out that my New Music Mix was two-dimensional:
Since I recently got a new guitar, and have been listening to a lot of old blues, the My New Music Mix is offering me almost exclusively blues music. This ignores the rest of my iTunes library, my Apple Music play history, and my iTunes Store purchases. Sure, there’s some interesting music in the playlist, but I’d expect to hear more variety. There is one track of a piece by Steve Reich, a song by Ian Bostridge from his Shakespeare Songs album, and a few classical movements, plus a handful of random new-agey piano pieces that all sound alike, but the playlist is about 50% blues, with most of the blues songs at the beginning.
Today, I looked at the My New Music Mix, which just updated, and what do I see? Almost nothing but classical music.
This can’t be the result of some algorithm, someone at Apple is messing with me. There’s no reason for this to contain so much classical music, especially since I haven’t listened to much classical music in the past few weeks. In fact, I haven’t listened to much music an Apple Music at all in the past couple of weeks.
I note that for a while I wasn’t seeing this mix, and some correspondents have reported not seeing it, or not seeing its sibling, the My Favorites Mix.
The My Favorites Mix is great, and has been so since its launch. But the My New Music Mix is just weird. I think Apple is messing with me; there’s no other explanation.