Musish has put together a web player for Apple Music. It looks pretty good.
Web Player for Apple Music
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Apple Music Wrapped: A Shortcut to Visualize Your Most Listened Songs, Artists, and Genres of the Year
Federico Viticci, over at MacStories, has put together one of the most incredible Shortcuts I’ve ever seen:
When Spotify was my music streaming service of choice, one of the features I really liked was its personalized Wrapped report generated at the end of the year. I’ve always been a fan of geeky annual reports and stats about the usage of any given web service – be it Spotify, Pocket, or Toggl. I appreciate a detailed look at 12 months of collected data to gain some insight into my habits and patterns. […]
But Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding this feature to Apple Music, so I decided to build my own using Shortcuts. The result is the most complex shortcut I’ve ever created comprising over 540 actions. It’s not perfect due to the limitations of iOS and Shortcuts, but it’s the closest I was able to come to replicating Spotify’s excellent Wrapped feature.
As anyone that’s played around with the Shortcut app will tell you, this is extremely impressive. I highly recommend reading the entire post from Viticci to see how he built it and what the limitations are. I ran it to analyze my top 200 songs and was surprised to learn I listened to Tonight Alive a lot more than I remembered. You can find my full report here, if you’re curious.
Grab the Shortcut here.
Apple Music Comes to the Amazon Echo
Apple Music is now available on the Amazon Echo:
To set up Apple Music on the Echo, open the Alexa iOS app and go to the Music section of the app’s Settings. You won’t see Apple Music listed as an existing service, so tap the ‘Link New Service’ button, which will list Apple Music along with several other services.
Once you’ve logged in with your Apple Music credentials, the Apple Music Skill is enabled, which allows you to say things like ‘Alexa, play my New Music Mix on Apple Music.’ You can separately set Apple Music as your default music service, which lets you use Alexa to request music without specifying ‘on Apple Music.’
I’ve been playing with it all weekend and it works great. It doesn’t (currently) have access to your entire iCloud Music Library, so things in your personal collection aren’t available, but the millions of songs on Apple Music are all available, as are your custom playlists.
Apple Music Removing “Connect”
Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac:
Apple has started notifying Apple Music artists that it is removing the ability for artists to post content to Apple Music Connect, and previously posted Apple Music Connect content is being removed from the For You section and Artist Pages in Apple Music. Connect content will still be viewable through search results on Apple Music, but Apple is removing artist-submitted Connect posts from search in May.
I miss Rdio and I miss their “heavy rotation” feed. That was the right way to integration social features into a music streaming service.
Apple Music for Business (Restaurants, Bars, Stores, etc.)
There’s a common misunderstanding among business owners that songwriters are only compensated by the purchase of their CDs, so that a business owner can freely play copyrighted music for customers. Not so, and Apple’s new trademark filing for ‘Apple Music for Business’ indicates that Apple will be entering this new business avenue for Apple music in the future as the company seeks to expand their services businesses.
Interesting.
Apple Music Shares Top Music From 2018
Apple Music have posted up the top artists and songs from 2018.
Visualize Your Apple Music History
Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac:
Murray’s tool shows your most listened to song on Apple Music since Apple Music launched in 2015, as well as the songs you listened to most each year. You can also see the total amount of time you’ve spent listening to Apple Music, the day you spent the most time playing music, and much more. Privacy is of course a concern here, but Murray promises that no data ever leaves your computer and all computation is done in the browser.
These are the kinds of things Apple Music should build into the product. At the end of the year I always create a bunch of Smart Playlists to give me information like this, but having it all in one place, and updated automatically, would be so much better.
Apple Music Coming to Amazon Echo on December 17th
Apple Music subscribers will be able to enjoy Apple Music’s 50 million songs on Echo devices. Customers will be able to ask Alexa to play their favorite songs, artists, and albums — or any of the playlists made by Apple Music’s editors from around the world, covering many activities and moods. […] Simply enable the Apple Music skill in the Alexa app and link your account to start listening.
I’m more excited about this than I thought I’d be.
Genius Teams Up With Apple Music
Genius will be providing lyrics to Apple Music:
Genius has the world’s best lyrics database and now it’s available on Apple Music. Genius will provide lyrics to thousands of hit songs on the service—bringing world-class accuracy and timeliness powered by Genius’s global community of artists and fans.
Apple Music Gains Better Album Organization
Federico Viticci, writing for MacStories:
While the old artist page design of Apple Music mixed albums, singles, EPs, live albums, and more under the same ‘Albums’ section, the new Apple Music features separate sections for different types of music releases. The new sections include singles and EPs, live albums, essential albums recommended by Apple Music editors, compilations, and appearances by an artist on other albums. As pictured above, Apple Music now also highlights an artist’s latest or upcoming release at the top of the page.
Much better.
Apple Music to Publish Its Own Top Music Charts
Apple Music, in a software update Friday to all users, is rolling out 116 “top 100” numeric charts, which will display the top-streamed songs on Apple Music refreshed on a regular basis. In a demo to Rolling Stone, Apple Music executives showed how the charts — one global chart and a top 100 chart for every country in which Apple Music is available — are grouped together under the platform’s “Browse” tab and have a similar visual appearance to that of playlists or albums. Each chart is updated daily at 12 a.m. PST.
The global chart can be found here.
Apple Music Launches “Friends Mix”
Apple Music has launched a new “Friends Mix” that will give you a list of 25 songs each week based on the listening habits of people you follow on the service. You can find this in the “For You” section of Apple Music. My “Friends Mix” looks basically exactly like you’d expect.
If you want my spins showing up in your mix, feel free to follow me here. It’s been a lot of punk music lately.
Apple Music Rolling Out Update With ‘Coming Soon’ Section
Mitchel Broussard, writing at MacRumors:
Apple appears to be rolling out a series of updates for Apple Music today, including a small but useful new section called “Coming Soon,” which allows subscribers to check out new albums about to be released over the next few weeks. […] In another addition, Apple is now making it possible to easily see album launch dates on their respective pages on iOS and macOS. In the Editors’ Notes section, following the traditional encouragement to add the pre-release album to your library, there’s a new line that begins “Album expected…” followed by the album’s specific release date.
Some nice updates, but what I really want is one feed/section that simply gives me a chronological listing of newly released albums from people already in my collection. On Friday morning I should be able to look one place and see all the new albums from people Apple Music already knows I like and listen to. I’m cool with a smaller scattering of recommendations for new music I may like under that main list as well, but finding the newly released albums from artists I already love should be easy. Half the time I’ll forget I pre-added an album that’s out today and this kind of reminder would be great. Hell, so many of my friends don’t even know their favorite band released new music over the past five years. This is a solvable problem.
Update: I was just looking around in the new Apple Music, and I don’t know if this is new or not, but if you go to the “For You” section and scroll to the very bottom, there’s a “New Releases” section. Clicking “See All” seems pretty close to what I’m talking about. However, it’s definitely missing things from artists in my collection with new albums. For example, that Lykke Li album released today isn’t in my listing even though all of her albums are in my library.
Apple Music and Pandora No Longer Promoting R. Kelly
Apple Music and Pandora have also stopped promoting R. Kelly on their platforms:
Now, a source close to the matter tells Pitchfork that Apple Music also begun to stop promoting R. Kelly in featured playlists over the past several weeks. The decision was made quietly, and it pre-dates Spotify’s announcement. Kelly’s music has been pulled from Apple Music-curated playlists such as “Best Slow Jams of the 90s, Vol. 1” and Vol. 2. (Kelly is prominently featured in the artwork for the playlists, but his music is no longer in them.)
I want a “block artist” button on Apple Music (and Spotify). Something that I can click to keep an artist from ever showing up at all, anywhere, on the platform. Maybe even granular control so you could check one box to just block that artist everywhere, and another if you still want their “features” to appear in the tracklists for albums you listen to.
I also think that these services should start looking into informing listeners on artist pages about things that someone may want to know before listening to an artist. These pages already have biographies on them, why not include the facts about abuse allegations as well?
Apple Music Hits 40 Million Subscribers
Apple Music has hit 40 million subscribers:
The service still has a ways to go before it surpasses Spotify, which currently has 70 million paid Premium subscribers. A report in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year suggests that Apple Music’s quicker growth rate (five percent versus Spotify’s two percent growth) could mean it surpassing the Swedish streaming service as soon as this summer, however.