They took it from Beats yea
Interesting. It is indeed a good way to push people to artists they hadn't heard of (assuming it was properly done, of course). With Apple Music, albeit I am just getting cracking with the three month trial, I am not so confident it is going to be delivering truly tailored results. For instance, with each track "loved" and added to the services' "My Music" section, Apple is claiming that it will improve its fit for you. However, after I got done selecting a dozen or so artists upon entering the trial, I noticed that what it was mostly doing at the "For You" tab was just throw me into the collection of artists (or ones so similar and popular I was bound to know of their work anyway) I had selected at that set-up screen.
It is also counter productive. I thought the idea of being in the business was to sell as much as possible right? So why make it exclusive?
Well, it's a two-way success thing. For the streaming service provider, it's a means to suck away the competition (at least, initially). For the artist, it's a means to get more money. As for Taylor Swift, I thought she was being a duplicitous little turd. She had a hissy fit because Spotify wasn't paying her enough. Then a short time later she becomes the face for Tidal, which provided absolutely no benefit for the consumer, at twice the cost. We were supposed to feel sorry for her and all of the already-successful artists out there who wanted more money. I wasn't having it. Then she signs with Apple Music, because of the higher fee structure.
Then she has a hissy fit because Apple wasn't providing fees during the 3 month trial process, and proceeds to write this silly open letter to Apple on behalf of not only rich girls like herself, but also the poor, starving indie artist. Yeah, right, Taylor; like I buy that for a minute. But pretty young, rich white girls get the sympathy vote, I suppose.
You own a song, it has bad words in.. you do a match with iCloud and suddenly you get the censored version. There are also complaints about people getting lossless music downgraded in iTunes Match and so on. It is so bad that some reviewers and people are refusing to turn on the iCloud match in the new service because it might screw with their music on their devices. Problem is, that this makes large parts of the new service unusuable, as it is a requirement to have iCloud match active.
This is what I am talking about when I say nearly incomprehensible series of digital handshakes. iTunes Match, worked well, but not well enough for me to actually
delete the tracks to get the 256 kbps AAC version from the store. It's basically give it two cheers, but not more.
The Apple Music-->iCloud issue is different.
Oh and it also requires of course that iCloud is actually working.. which can be a crap shoot often.
Or, in my case, a reboot and resyncing process for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
Yes I understand, but the interface in iTunes has slowly become more and more annoying (like when they made the burn to CD option basically hidden), and if you are on a Windows Machine, iTunes is basically malware. It is bloated, slow and actually slows down the machine more than anti-virus.
I agree on the first part, but not the malware bit. I experienced more clunk and whatnot with Winamp's last years than I did with iTunes. However, it has basically created a problem where one did not exist prior. Before it functioned essentially like Spotify does today, even though it had a movie and tv store, iPod, iPad syncing capabilities. But for some reason because people said there was too much bloat, Apple decides to solve the "issue" by creating a series of confusing navigation options. The traditional layout no longer existed, and in order to get there temporarily, you had to keep clicking on a tab, and then when you would search within your own library, it would once again fling you into another view of the library. You know, not even Winamp or Foobar had as good of a search bar as iTunes did, but when I was continually forced to find way way again each time I searched for a file, I just moved on.
Mine is more simple.. Use Spotify free..
There's stuff about Apple Music I like much better than Spotify (including smart playlist functionality), but with the multitude of navigation & syncing issues, and the lack of user-submitted playlists it's going to be difficult to sell me on jumping ship.
