Apple Music impressions: Tunes for (a more generic version of) you

 

When Apple showed up to the portable music device industry in 2001, the computer maker didn't have the advantage of being earliest to market. It had to win out by way of simplicity and usability, which its innovative, touch-sensitive click-wheel accomplished heartily.

Apple has since tried to replicate that click-wheel simplicity—albeit through entirely new interfaces and control methods—with varying levels of success, from amazing (iPhone) to lukewarm (Apple Watch). This week saw a relatively smaller launch of the new Apple Music app, and while it doesn't quite compare to a hardware rollout, it's hard not to look at the company's first music-streaming service and think about the iPod's incredible simplicity and reminisce fondly—maybe a little too fondly—about those good ol' days.

That's because Apple Music, while competent and comparable to the music-streaming competition, offers nothing remarkably superior to any other existing option.

Bubble pop, bubble bubble bubble pop

Apple Music—which launched on Tuesday as a dedicated iOS 8.4 app, along with a new tab in Windows and Mac versions of iTunes—revolves largely around unlimited access to Apple's streaming music library, which is comparable to the likes of Spotify, Tidal, and Google Play Music. That means there are a lot of songs, but heavies like The Beatles are nowhere to be found. (Apple Music did land Taylor Swift's 1989, at any rate.)

Should you elect to pay its $10 monthly subscription fee (which is currently waived for a three-month promotional period, meaning you get three months for free starting whenever you join), Apple Music will connect you to its full streaming library—whose songs can be downloaded for offline play—along with an improved version of the old iTunes Radio playlist selection that won't limit the number of times you can skip its songs. Paid users can also upload and match their offline song libraries, a la iTunes Match. Free Apple Music users still get access to that "Radio" playlist option, though their skips are limited, and they can listen to the new Beats One radio station (more on that later).

But Apple Music presents all of this content oddly. The app has elected to spread its content across six tabs in a toolbar—and a disparate search bar that combs all of those tabs along with artist, song, and album titles—and the disparate parts don't all work exactly as you might hope.

Upon my first load of the app, I tapped the giant heart in the toolbar that reads "For You," and I immediately became frustrated. "Tell us what you're into," it beckoned, but I couldn't type out individual artists. Instead, I had to vote for genres floating around the screen as little bubbles. Tap a genre's bubble if I like it, double-tap a genre that I love, and press-and-hold any genre I dislike.

I know some people can categorically state that they love hip-hop or hate metal, but that doesn't work for me. For example, in the country genre, I like a decent range of artists—Kacey Musgraves, Neko Case, Waylon Jennings—but gag me with a spoon if Garth Brooks or Big & Rich start playing. Same with jazz, a genre in which I have a very, very specific hard-bop jones. Apple Music doesn't help matters with some vague choices—like, why does it list "pop" and "hits" as separate genres?

I tried a mix of taps, double-taps and press-to-holds, and then I was asked to tap on specific artists to list as favorites—but I had to choose from whatever bubbles the app populated, as opposed to typing in the ones that I already know I love. The auto-bubbles included some good guesses, including Sonic Youth and Loretta Lynn, and I eventually got a decent selection of beloved acts if I picked a few and then said "give me more acts," but I would've rather entered my known faves.

With all of that out of the way, I was then taken to a very boring "For You" splash screen. Meaning, I was given six pre-made playlists to choose from—some of which revolved around acts I'd already listed as favorites—and 12 full-length albums by acts the app thought I'd be into. To its credit, all of the stuff that popped up was pleasant, but the playlists offered few musical surprises, and they felt like they'd been tacked onto obvious, popular artists. "You like Beck?" the app seemed to shout. "Here, this playlist is pretty Beck-ish."

You like jazz? Here, have Primus

I wanted very badly to see what would happen if I added my all-time favorite band to this mix of inspirations, as opposed to one Apple had scrutinized in advance, which led me to the search bar—the only way Apple Music lets you pick out a specific act.

There, I typed in "Morphine," a Boston three-piece. One reason I love Morphine is for utility's sake: It's a great band to throw at music apps. The trio is all over the genre map (part jazz, part folk, part rock, part college/indie), and their tunes only bordered on fame in the late '90s, so they're not as likely to have been included in manual curation lists.

In their case, I created a band-specific radio station, as iTunes Radio had permitted in the past (and as most other music apps already enable), and it was a disaster. After playing a Morphine song, a song from affiliated band Treat Her Right, and a sonically comparable song by Mark Lanegan, the playlist took a weird turn into Primus and Fugazi—bands I can stomach, certainly, but in no way did I tell Apple Music that I liked their brand of punk. At no point did the playlist go into more baroque or jazzy sounds; it must have looked at the band's record labels and "college" status and been done with the analysis portion.

To be fair, Apple's version of the "search bar" includes Siri, and no Apple Music test is complete without putting new voice commands to the test. We saw reports that the latest version of Siri is smart enough to understand requests like "play the song from Reservoir Dogs" and "play that one song from Top Gun"—and we confirmed those—but like in Vulture's extensive tests, we found that most "play me" requests simply took a word we said and found a song title that matched. ("Play me a song about February," for example, brought up a spoken word track in which a British man read all of the months of the year out loud.)

For more surprising songs and options, the "New" and "Radio" tabs are your best bets; the former is actually better described as a combination of the App Store's "Top Charts" and "Featured" tabs, and you can either queue an album or have a "top charts" playlist begin in any genre of your choice. The latter, as mentioned before, contains all of iTunes Radio's old playlists—in skip-free form for paying subscribers—along with the free-for-all-users Beats One radio station.

"One" must be emphasized because there's only one station to choose from (unless you count the two other feeds from NPR and ESPN Radio). Are you between the ages of 12 and 27? If so, Beats One might be the radio station for you. Its normal airplay skews heavily toward top-40 pop, hip-hop, and "alternative" songs, with occasional throwback songs in those mixes. Even if you like the tunes, their presentation is remarkably bad, with DJs shouting over songs—radio-friendly censored versions, at that—and the service electing to play heavily shortened versions of the songs. (This was most apparent when Eminem's "Stan" played, after an "exclusive" Beats One Eminem interview, without the song's crazed ending.)

Artist-specific hours on Beats One occasionally pop up, and so far, those have included offerings like St. Vincent's "Mixtape Delivery Service" and Josh "Queens of the Stone Age" Homme's "Alligator Hour." The artist-specific playlists do a much better job of diving into crates and pulling out surprises, but so far, they're skewing terribly young and hip. Apple adds one other major inconvenience to the mix, should you still be interested in its Beats One song selection: The "Airplay" option disappears from your mobile device iTunes-playing computer whenever Beats One is playing. (Update: We tested once more and found this issue occurred on computers using iTunes but not on iOS devices.)

What the heck? Is this some sort of anti-piracy move? If Apple's actually concerned that tapers are trying to capture these shortened, talked-over, censored versions of pop hits, we want a hit of whatever they're smoking.

A lonely, gilded garden

"Connect" is Apple's second attempt to integrate social media-styled content into a music experience, and like Ping before it, it feels pretty half-baked. It's a Twitter-like stream of updates from participating artists, meaning they have to sign into Apple Music before they'll pop up in your app. As a result, very few musicians are on board, and even fewer have uploaded songs, photos, or text updates to the service. Really, why should they do so within Apple Music's gilded garden when they can use Twitter and SoundCloud to offer the same content to a much larger audience (and more devices)?

"Playlists" and "My Music" round out the tabs, but we don't understand why the former wasn't just tucked into the latter. That's because the playlists that are generated when you first launch Apple Music are just cribbed from your iTunes library, which is what the My Music tab consists of.

Some Ars staffers had no issues with our OS X iTunes app uploading our entire iTunes library to Apple Music's "My Music" cloud storage—an option formerly limited to subscribers of the $25/year iTunes Match service, which still exists. However, other Ars staffers exceed the current 25,000 song-matching limit, which has borked their ability to cleanly use Apple Music; Apple has said it will attempt to raise that limit to 100,000 songs by the time iOS 9 rolls out. Also, we've read reports that other song uploaders have faced serious tag errors that require database rewrites. Should your iTunes library be unwieldy in the tags department at all, you've been warned.

For now, Apple Music doesn't have Spotify's wealth of user-created playlists, a fact that could change over time, but it has been built for playlist sharing via basic HTTP links. Similar to other sharing services, those playlists will automatically update for their subscribers whenever the creator makes any changes. Still, Apple has too many shrunken menus for this sort of functionality, and in a glaring oversight, users can't create a new playlist when they try to grab a single song. Instead, they have to go to the root Playlists tab and make a new playlist; then they can click on a song that's playing and add it in.

That's a bit of a no-big-deal whine, but Apple Music is too late to the sector to get away with its rough edges. Clunky playlist management; slow menu screen loads; bad custom radio station generation; a lousy first-splash for Beats One; a lonely "Connect" social network; and worst of all, a "For You" page that feels like it's been designed for a much more generic version of yourself. Should you wish to remain offline and continue using iTunes the way you used to on iOS, you lose some shortcut functionality thanks to the online modes' tabs taking up default space.

Apple Music, for the music-streaming newbie, will still get the job done, but not so much that those invested in other streaming services will feel compelled to switch—especially since competitors like Rdio, Spotify, and even Google Play Music integrate so smoothly into both iOS and Android. Meanwhile, iTunes super-loyalists may face the insane issue of their libraries being too big for Apple.

Thanks to Apple Music's introductory three-month offer, at least, Apple has been kind enough to let us all try before we do not buy.